Question

I wrote the code below to split up a fullname from a .csv file into a first name, middle name, and last name. It works well and gives the following kind of output:

Eric,T.,Nolan
Mary,,Worth
Jim,T.,Lane
E.,Thomas,Powell
William,Reilly,Smith
Johnny,,Depp
Stevie,de,la Soul 

I can get it to print to the screen, but need help putting it back in a new .csv file with three fields separated by commas (i.e., firstname, middlename, lastname). Not sure if I should use fwrite or fputcsv. Took me a long time just to split the name and now I’m stuck on writing it back to a new csv file. I’d appreciate some help from the gurus. Thanks all!

Here’s my code:

<?php

$file = fopen('nameFile.csv', 'r');
$row = 0;
while (($line = fgetcsv($file)) !== FALSE)
{
list($name[]) = $line;
$row++;
}
$number_of_rows = $row;
fclose($file);

for($i = 0; $i < $number_of_rows; $i++) {
foreach ($name as $NameSplit)
  list($first[], $middle[], $last[]) = explode(' ', $NameSplit, 3);
  if ( !$last[$i] ) {
    $last[$i] = $middle[$i];
    unset($middle[$i]);
  } 
echo $first[$i] . "," . $middle[$i] . "," . $last[$i] . "<br>\n";  
  }

?>

Answer 1

At the risk of spoon feeding you, I’ve decided to redo it all. Your code shows the hallmarks of a new programmer (no offense).

Compare my code to your own. You were using list incorrectly, looping unnecessarily, incrementing an unnecessary counter; to name a few issues.

Note, this hinges on the assumption that the input file isn’t an actual CSV file, but simply a file with one name per line. I may have misinterpreted your code in drawing this conclusion.

$file = fopen('nameFile.csv', 'r');

while (($line = fgets($file)) !== FALSE)
{
    $names_array[] = trim($line); // trim whitespace at the begining and end of each line, in this case the EOL character(s)
}

fclose($file);

$output_file = fopen('/var/tmp/output.csv', 'w');  // this will clobber the file output.csv  use 'a' instead of 'w' if you want to add to an existing file

foreach ($names_array as $name)
{
    $processed_name = explode(' ', $name, 3); // split the name, based on spaces

    // not all full names contain a middle name     
    if (!isset($processed_name[2]))
    {
        $processed_name[2] = $processed_name[1];
        $processed_name[1] = null;
    }

    // output each line into a CSV file
    fputcsv($output_file, $processed_name);
}

fclose($output_file);