Question

I have a text document that is opened and read by php that looks like this

ABC: 123

DEF: 456

GHI: 789

So basically it is one piece of text ended with a colon, followed by another piece of text. To separate the lines there is a line break (i.e. ” \n “)

Is it possible to have this go into an array separated by the colon and the line break? So that when I print the value it should look like this:

” ABC:123,DEF:456,GHI:789 “

Answer 1

First thing you need to do is split those lines up.

$lines = explode("\n", $doctext);

Next, process those lines one-by-one, splitting out the appropriate values.

$output = array();
foreach ($lines as $line) {
    $line_parts = explode(': ', $line, 2); // Limit 2, in case data contains a colon
    $output[$line_parts[0]] = $line_parts[1];
}

Then, you can find your array in $output. Note that you should also add some validation to these lines and what not, to make sure they contain the data you expect. Also, if the lines optionally contain a space between the colon and the value, or a variable amount of whitespace, then split on the colon and use trim() on the value, as appropriate.