Question

I’ve looked for questions on this topic, but failed to get what I’m looking for. This is for C++, I need similar for PHP. This is for including php files, I just want to read a CSV file.

I have this:

if(file_exists("data.csv")){
    echo "CSV file found";

    $csv_data = file_get_contents("data.csv"); 

    $lines = explode("\n", trim($csv_data));   

    $array = array();

    foreach ($lines as $line){
            $array[] = str_getcsv($line);

}else {echo "File not found";}

But I want to NOT specify the file name – i.e. generically load/read/open the file.

Is there any simple why of doing that? Doesn’t make sense, but I was told to not have anything hard coded in my PHP script.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you may not have anything hard coded in your script, you need to put those hardcoded things into some sort of external config file. You will have to hardcode the name of that config file into your bootstrap or whatever comes first in your application. Once the config is loaded, make the configuration data available in the places where it is needed. Not hardcoding configuration data into your code will allow you to create more reusable components and code, e.g. CSV Reader that can read any CSV file instead of a CSV Reader that can only read that one particular CSV file hardcoded into it.

Example:

// config.php
<?php
return array(
    'csvFile' => '/path/to/file.csv',
    …
);

// bootstrap.php
<?php
$config = include '/path/to/config.php';
…

// someFile.php
<?php
include '/path/to/bootstrap.php';
$file = new SplFileObject($config['csvFile']);
$file->setFlags(SplFileObject::READ_CSV);
foreach ($file as $row) {
   // Do something with values
}