Question

I would like to use a textarea in html form to get the delimited data

for example:
The simple data is like the following

[e-mail] peter USA 
[e-mail] Tony USA 
[e-mail] tom USA 
[e-mail] peter USA
testA@.com peter USA

The problems are:

1. How to check where is each line ends? (\n)?

2. How to do duplication checking (only for email)? (if 3 data each row, get 1,4,7,11…data, and array_unique?)

3. Should i restrict the deliminator symbol or i do something to check automatically?

4. What If space is deliminator , but at same time my other data eg. is using space e.g. Tony Hanks ?

Thank you for any kind of help

Answer 1

First I would split string by line ends:

$r = explode(PHP_EOL, $data); //data is your raw data from textarea

To check the delimiter, explode first line by all delimiters that are possible and check array count.

foreach( array(' ', ';', '/') as $delimiter) {
  $x = explode($delimiter, r[0]);
  if(count($x) == 3) {
    break;
  }
}

After that use proper delimiter with str-getcsv on raw data: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-getcsv.php

What If space is deliminator , but at same time my other data eg. is using space e.g. Tony Hanks ?

In that case you need to use quotes. Excel also could not handle this without quotes.

How to do duplication checking (only for email)?

Create array where keys are emails. Iterate through your parsed csv and check if key isset already or not.