Question

I have a PHP site and a cron job which runs to update the DB for the site. The cron reads a CSV file which is uploaded by a third party. Recently this cron job stopped working correctly. After some investigation, I’ve discovered that the problem is in the CSV file. The problem is that the new line character in the CSV has changed from the standard “\n” to the older ASCII “^M” and PHP doesn’t seem to recognise this as a new line so instead of seeing the CSV as multiline, it is seeing it as one single line of info. I have only been able to see this difference in the Command Line text apps less and vim. Does anyone know of a way to get PHP to recognise these new line characters?

By way of an example, the incorrect CSV file looks similar to this in vim:

Heading 1,Heading 2,Heading 3,^MInfo 1-1,Info 1-2,Info 1-3,^MInfo 2-1,Info 2-2,Info 2-3,^M^M

Whereas the older (correct) version displays like this in vim:

Heading 1,Heading 2,Heading 3,
Info 1-1,Info 1-2,Info 1-3,
Info 2-1,Info 2-2.Info 2-3,

Answer 1

Set the auto_detect_line_endings option appropriately.