Question

I need to find out if a certain string is found in a CSV file in PHP. The string may be found in any of the fields in my CSV list.

CSV list is like:

"John Doe", "[e-mail]", "other information", "0800-0880880", "still some info"
"Other John", "other information"

etc, so that the lines in my CSV do not contain the same information.

I want to know if the any of the strings are found in any of the fields anyway.

This is what I’ve tried (and yes, I’m pretty bad at PHP):

<?php
$file_handle = fopen("csv.txt", "r");
$words = array('john', '[e-mail]');
$words = array_map('preg_quote', $words);
$regex = '/'.implode('|', $words).'/i';

while (($line = fgetcsv($file_handle)) !== FALSE) {
list($name, $age, $hobbies) = $line;
if(in_array($regex, $line)) {
    echo "found";
}
}

However, this doesnt echo anything.

Answer 1

Instead of reinventing the wheel use the fgetcsv() function. https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php

Once you have your data use in_array() to see if each line has your search data.

in_array() does not use a regex, it’s a string (not even a substring).