Question

I have a file that looks like this (with newlines and weird spacing):

Player:         Alive: Score: Ping: Member of Team: 
player1         No     16     69    dogs      
bug             Yes    2      63    insects            
name with space No     0      69    cats        
bob             No     0      69    dogs

How can I grab the first column and turn it into an array?

Desired Output:
$players[1] —-> “player1”
$players[2] —-> “bug”
$players[3] —-> “name with space”
$players[4] —-> “bob”

Answer 1

Here is an approach with Iterators:

class SubstringIterator extends IteratorIterator
{
    protected $startAtOffset, $endAtOffset;

    public function __construct($iterator, $startAtOffset, $endAtOffset = null) {
        parent::__construct($iterator);
        $this->startAtOffset = $startAtOffset;
        $this->endAtOffset = $endAtOffset;
    }

    public function current() {
        return substr(parent::current(), $this->startAtOffset, $this->endAtOffset);
    }
}

You would use it like this:

$playerIterator = new LimitIterator(
    new SubstringIterator(
        new SplFileObject('yourFile.txt'), 
        0, // start at beginning of line 
        15 // end before Alive:
    ) 
    , 1 // start at line 2 in file (omits the headline)
);

You can then foreach over the iterator, e.g.

foreach ($playerIterator as $player) {
    echo $player, PHP_EOL;
}

Output:

player1        
bug            
name with space
bob         

Or transform the stacked Iterators into an array:

$array = iterator_to_array($playerIterator);
print_r($array);

Output:

Array
(
    [1] => player1        
    [2] => bug            
    [3] => name with space
    [4] => bob            
)

Demo of above examples with your file’s data