Question

I need to read a list of CSV files from an FTP and delete them after I successfully read them.

Until now, i opened the csv file using fopen into a resource and then used fgetcsv to read the csv lines from it.

  $res = fopen($url);
  while ($csv_row = fgetcsv($res, null, self::DELIMITER)) {
  .....
  }

The problem is that I need to read a list of csv files and delete them too. the ftp_get function save the file into a local file. I rather avoid that. any way I can keep using the fgetcsv function with the ftp_nlist & ftp_connect functions? ?

Answer 1

You can save the csv file to a temporary file stream using ftp_fget(). This allows you to avoid the "create-read-delete" cycle. Once you close the file stream it’s like it magically never existed 🙂

$ftp_handle = ftp_connect($ftp_server);
$remote_path = "/path/to/file.csv";
$tmp_handle = fopen('php://temp', 'r+');

if (ftp_fget($ftp_handle, $tmp_handle, $remote_path, FTP_ASCII)) {
  rewind($tmp_handle);
  while ($csv_row = fgetcsv($tmp_handle)) {
    // do stuff
  }
}
fclose($tmp_handle);

If you wanted to loop over a directory of files just get the list of files and then put the above code in a loop.