Question

I have a csv upload in my site now when I try to do pregmatch for the first row of the csv, it is returning empty. See the code below.

 $uploaded_file = $upload_dir . $_FILES['my_upload_file']['name'];
 $uploaded_content = file( $uploaded_file, FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES );
 $regx_pattern = '/^(nickname|nick_name|family_name|\"nickname|"family_name)_/'; 
 $first_row = array_shift( $uploaded_content );
 $row_match = preg_match( $regx_pattern , $first_row, $matches );
 var_dump($matches);

Result:

array
    empty

But, if I declare $first_row as static value in my script by doing like this:

$first_row= 'nickname,nick_name_initial,nick_name_code';

It will return a match. Why isn’t it returning a match when I’m checking it from my csv data? Anyone encountered this?

Answer 1

If you want to ignore non alphanum and not quote characters at the begining of the string, you could do:

$regx_pattern = '/^[^\w"]*(nickname|nick_name|family_name|\"nickname|"family_name)_?/';
// $first_row = array_shift( $uploaded_content );
$first_row = 'nickname,nick_name_initial,nick_name_code';
$row_match = preg_match( $regx_pattern , $first_row, $matches );
var_dump($matches);

output:

array(2) {
  [0]=>
  string(14) "nickname"
  [1]=>
  string(8) "nickname"
}