Question

I’ve got a script that reads in from a CSV file and sometimes the CSV files it receives contains an uneven amount of delimiters/columns so the first row could have 30 columns, the 2nd could have 20, etc. I can think of a few solutions myself ie:

Count the delimiters in the widest row, then append the proper amount to each row that is short to make them even.

But I was wondering if anyone had a more elegant method of doing this.

Answer 1

It depends on what you are using to read the CSV the most elegant have seen is fgetcsv Please see http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php for more information

There is an example there that counts number of CSV:

$row = 1;
if (($handle = fopen("test.csv", "r")) !== FALSE) {
    while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
        $num = count($data);
        echo "<p> $num fields in line $row: <br /></p>\n";
        $row++;
        for ($c=0; $c < $num; $c++) {
            echo $data[$c] . "<br />\n";
        }
    }
    fclose($handle);
}