Question

I have a textarea that is populated with values. On submit button, I’m saving the value of textarea in a table in separate rows using this code:

echo "<center><textarea name='resulta' id='result' style='height:200px; width:350px' readonly=readonly></textarea></center>";
echo "<form><center><input type=submit name=subs value='Submit'></center></form>";
$val=$_POST['resulta'];

    if (isset($_POST['subs']))
    {

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

    foreach ($lines as $line) 
    {
        mysql_query("insert into postflight (sample_lang) values ('$line')") or die(mysql_error());

    }

If I have inputted the following in the textarea:

Tokyo - London -> 10:00:00
London - Tokyo -> 11:00:00

The postflight table will have these data respectively,

sfno  || bltime   || sample_lang
00001 || 00:00:00 || Tokyo - London -> 10:00:00
00002 || 00:00:00 || London - Tokyo -> 11:00:00

But, what I want to do is, add to sample_lang column ‘Tokyo – London’ then add to bltime column ’10:00:00′. The data in the postflight should look like this:

sfno  || bltime   || sample_lang
00001 || 10:00:00 || Tokyo - London
00002 || 11:00:00 || London - Tokyo

I have tried several MySQL string functions like explode, locate, trim but can’t get it to properly work. I’m not that familiar with MySQL string functions so I’m having a hard time getting this to work. Any ideas on how to do this will be appreciated. Thanks a lot!

EDIT:
I’m not limiting the possible solutions to MySQL string functions only. Of course I’m open to PHP solutions as well. I just stated what I’ve done so far to get this work. Thanks.

Answer 1

While this is technically possible to do purely in MySQL, what makes you think it’s your only option?

It’s really far easier to do string parsing in PHP.

foreach ($lines as $line) 
{
    $fields = explode('->', $line);
    $sample_lang = trim($fields[0]);
    $bltime = trim($fields[1]);
    mysql_query("insert into postflight (bltime, sample_lang) values ('".mysql_escape_string($bltime)."','".mysql_escape_string($sample_lang)."' )") or die(mysql_error());

}