Question

I have a text logfile, containing lines of data separated by ” | “

for example

date | time | ip | geo-location (city) | page viewed ......

I need to find the 10 most occuring “page views” in the text file….

each log of page view is listed as:

//pageurl 

as the log is on seperate lines I am presuming I would be searching for the page urls between

// [url name] \r\n

how would I code a search to list the top 10 urls and list them into an array….

for example:

$url[0]  <<this would be the most occuring url
$url[1]  <<thos would be the second most occuring url

and so on….. until I can list them up to:

$url[9]  <<which would be the 10th most common url

I am not sure how I would search between the ” // ” and the ” \r\n ”

and then convert the top 10 most common occurrences into an array…

edit: here is 2x lines of my logs, just to help even more if I can

sunday, january 22, 2012 | 16:14:36 | 82.**.***.*** | bolton | //error 
sunday, january 22, 2012 | 17:12:52 | 82.**.***.*** | bolton | //videos

Answer 1

Based on the information given, here’s a rather naïve approach:

/* get the contents of the log file */
$log_file = file_get_contents(__DIR__.'/log.txt');

/* split the log into an array of lines */
$log_lines = explode(PHP_EOL, $log_file);

/* we don't need the log file anymore, so free up some memory */
unset($log_file);

/* loop through each line */
$page_views = array();
foreach ($log_lines as $line) {
    /* get the text after the last pipe character (the page view), minus the ' //' */
    $page_views[] = ltrim(array_pop(explode('|', $line)), ' /');
}

/* we don't need the array of lines either, so free up that memory */
unset($log_lines);

/* count the frequency of each unique occurrence */
$urls = array_count_values($page_views);

/* sort highest to lowest (may be redundant, I think array_count_values does this) */
arsort($urls, SORT_NUMERIC);

print_r($urls);
/* [page_url] => num page views, ... */

/* that gives you occurrences, but you want a numerical 
   indexed array for a top ten, so... */

$top_ten = array();
$i = 0;
/* loop through the array, and store the keys in a new one until we have 10 of them */
foreach ($urls as $url => $views) {
  if ($i >= 10) break;
  $top_ten[] = $url;
  $i++;
}

print_r($top_ten);
/* [0] => page url, ... */

** Script output: **

Array
(
    [videos] => 1
    [error ] => 1
)
Array
(
    [0] => videos
    [1] => error 
)

It’s not the most optimal solution, and the bigger your log file, the longer it’ll take. To this end, you may be better off logging to a database and querying from that.