Question

I wanna read some text files in a folder line by line. for example of 1 txt :

Fast and Effective Text Mining Using Linear-time Document Clustering
Bjornar Larsen WORD2 Chinatsu Aone
SRA International AK, Inc.
4300 Fair Lakes Cow-l Fairfax, VA 22033

{bjornar-larsen, WORD1

I wanna remove line that does not contain of words = word, word2, word3, and does not end with dot .

so. from the example, the result will be :

Bjornar Larsen WORD2 Chinatsu Aone
SRA International, Inc.
{bjornar-larsen, WORD1

I am confused, hw to remove the line? it that possible? or can we replace them with a space?

here’s the code :

$url = glob($savePath.'*.txt');
foreach ($url as $file => $files) {
    $handle = fopen($files, "r") or die ('can not open file');
    $ori_content= file_get_contents($files);
    foreach(preg_split("/((\r?\n)|(\r\n?))/", $ori_content) as $buffer){
        $pos1 = stripos($buffer, $word1);
        $pos2 = stripos($buffer, $word2);
        $pos3 = stripos($buffer, $word3);
        $last = $str[strlen($buffer)-1];//read the las character
        if (true !== $pos1 OR true !== $pos2 OR true !==$pos3 && $last != '.'){
        //how to remove
        }
    }
}

please help me, thank you so much 🙂

Answer 1

You’re using a !== true comparison to test the return-value of the stripos. !== true means “is not absolutely equal-to the boolean value true”. The return-value of stripos is numeric, unless the word doesn’t exist, in which case it’s false. In other words, your condition is always false.

Try updating it to use === false instead. Also, you’re using OR in between each; Your example shows that it needs to only contain 1 of them – so if you’re checking that “none of them were found”, you’ll need to use && for everything:

if (($pos1 === false) && ($pos2 === false) && ($pos3 === false) && ($last != '.'))

Regarding “how to remove the line”, you’ll need to keep a list of all lines you want to keep. This means, we’ll actually want to flip the condition above to use !== false and an || between everything (because we want to keep all lines that match any rule).

Try something like this:

$url = glob($savePath.'*.txt');
foreach ($url as $file => $files) {
    $handle = fopen($files, "r") or die ('can not open file');
    $ori_content= file_get_contents($files);
    $linesToKeep = array(); // list of all lines that match our rules
    foreach(preg_split("/((\r?\n)|(\r\n?))/", $ori_content) as $buffer){
        $pos1 = stripos($buffer, $word1);
        $pos2 = stripos($buffer, $word2);
        $pos3 = stripos($buffer, $word3);
        $last = $str[strlen($buffer)-1];

        if (($pos1 !== false) || ($pos2 !== false) || ($pos3 !== false) || ($last == '.')) {
            $linesToKeep[] = $buffer; // save this line
        }
    }
    // process list of lines for this file;
    // file_put_contents($files, join("\r\n", $linesToKeep)); // write back to file
    // $lines = join("\r\n", $linesToKeep); // convert to string to manipulate
}

Now, you’ll have every line that matches your ruleset in the $linesToKeep array. You can convert this back to a string with $lines = join("\r\n", $linesToKeep);, or iterate through it and process it however you’d like.