Question

Ok, I have a csv file like this:

14 ; 1234,56 ; 10203 ; "ABC" ; "DFG" ; "Lorem \n ipsum \n dolor sit" \n
15 ; 234,16 ; 10204 ; "ABC" ; "DFG" ; "Lorem \n ipsum \n dolor sit" \n
16 ; 1234,15 ; 10304 ; "CCC" ; "DFG" ; "Lorem ipsum/dolor \n sit amet\consec" \n

and so on…

The file has almost 550000 lines.
How do I replace all \n characters inside double quotes at once?

I’m using PHP 5. Could it be done by preg_replace()?

Answer 1

I don’t know if you’re using fgetcsv(), but you can configure it to recognize individual fields including quoted information.

This way you can read your lines in one at a time and strip the new line characters at the field level rather than having to do an expensive RegEx operation on a large file all at once.

Slightly modified php code example from the documentation (replaced delimiter with ‘;’):

$row = 1;
$handle = fopen("data.txt", "r");
while (($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);

data.txt

14 ; 1234,56 ; 10203 ; "ABC" ; "DFG" ; "text 
 text 
 more text"
15 ; 234,16 ; 10204 ; "ABC" ; "DFG" ; "text 
 text 
 more text"

This will be recognized as 2 lines instead of 6 because fgetcsv() will recognize the new line characters in the quotes as part of the field and not additional lines of data.