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Asked: 2026-05-23T08:00:53+00:00

I’ve been a research programmer (MATLAB) for most of my programming career, writing things

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I’ve been a research programmer (MATLAB) for most of my programming career, writing things for only myself that can be run on my own computer. Now, I’d like to be able to have people submit a comma-delimited text file and get processed text files in return without having to use my computer directly (only 1 MATLAB installment).

I’m thinking perhaps this can be done on my web server (XAMPP) over LAN and some programming language script that can be run on my server. This is what I’m thinking:

  1. have people create comma-delimited text files.
  2. have them go to a site I created on my localhost and submit it via a webpage forum.
  3. have the uploaded file processed in PHP (small files, < 100KB). This involves looking up a MySQL database as well.
  4. have people download the processed files somehow.

Is this a sound system? By “sound” I mean, if you, the expert, wanted to set up this system, would this be the steps and tools you would use? I’ve been learning PHP lately, and it seems like I could do this using PHP, but I’m not sure if this is the right tool for the task. The whole thing seems … a bit on-the-fly, as in you upload the file, and things are done in PHP memory (from what I’ve read) instead of the file being stored on my server and the server running a script using that file (is there a difference?!). I would be greatly thankful if you guys could chime in and give me some pointers on how to do this properly (general ideas, not asking for codes).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    PHP is most definitely a good tool for something like this. As meteorainer mentioned, PHP offers a pretty simple solution for most of what you need to do, and is much less complicated (in my opinion) than Java or .NET. I also believe it to be much easier to get started with.

    As far as pointers go, a lot of what you need to accomplish can be found in the PHP manual itself, along with code samples. For example:

    File uploads:
    http://php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.php

    CSV Processing:
    http://php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php
    or, the method meteorainer mentioned
    https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php

    MySQL Databases:
    https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.mysql.php
    https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-connect.php

    Creating new files:
    http://php.net/manual/en/function.fwrite.php

    As far as whether or not this is a sound system, that all really depends on what this is going to be used for. I may be wrong, but it sounds like you just need a simple application for a very specific use. If this is the case, I would say it sounds just fine. You can always expand upon it later on if you choose to do so. Adding more security measures, more robust output, things like that. Either way, at the very least, your PHP implementation sounds like pretty good starting point to me.

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