Question

I have following data extracted from the MySQL database to create labels.

BREAK

Name:RAJ
Company:ABC
Order Number:101

Order Details:
Item1
Item20
Item3

BREAK

Name:RAJ
Company:ABC
Order Number:101

Order Details:
2 x Item1
2 x Item2
2 x Item3

BREAK

Name:RAJ
Company:ABC
Order Number:101

Order Details:
5 x Item4
5 x Item5
5 x Item2

I wrote some code to find the position of BREAK in PHP and it can generate lines number like below.

2
14
26
36

I want a file for the contents that are between line 2 and 14 in one file and 26 to 36 in one file. I am working in php and tried using sed from shell_exec function however if I read this output and generate sed command, I don’t get first 2 number together.

What I am expecting is below.

sed -n 2,14p file1.txt
sed -n 26,36p file2.txt

Any suggestion either in php or shell script?

Answer 1

Use array_slice() for getting ranges in an array.
My solution is very hard coupled to your requirements, meaning every first line is a starting range number and the following the end range.

// the lines from which will be read
$lines = "1
5
16
26";
// split these numbers above into an array
$lines = explode(PHP_EOL, $lines);

// the source file where the ranges will be taken off
$file = file('file.txt');


for($i = 0; $i < count($lines); $i+=2) {
  $rangeStart  = $lines[$i];
  $rangeLength = $lines[$i+1] - $lines[$i];

  // slice out the ranges, beware the second parameter is the length not the offset!
  $ranges[] = array_slice($file, $rangeStart, $rangeLength);

}

print_r($ranges);

---

But it would be a lot easier to do it automatically on your source file/text/string (?) directly, if this is possible.

$file = file('file.txt');
$len  = count($file);

$output  = array();
$current = array();
for($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) {
  $data = trim($file[$i]);

  if ($data != 'BREAK') {
    $current[] = $data;
  } else {
    $output[] = implode(PHP_EOL, $current);
    $current  = array();
  }
}

print_r($output);