Question

what is the best way of extracting multiple (~40 values) from a text file using php?

the data is more or less like:

NAMEA                   valuea
NAMEB                   valueb

I’m looking for a proper* approach to extracting this data into a data-structure, because i will need to specify regexs for all of them (all 40).

did i make myself clear?

*meaning, the default/painful method would be for me to do:

$namea = extractfunction("regexa", $textfilevalue);
$nameb = extractfunction("regeb", $textfilevalue);

… 40 times!

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The lines may not be in the same order, or be present in each file. Every NAMEA is text like: “Registration Number:”, or “Applicant Name:” (ie, with spaces in what i was calling as NAMEA)

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Response to the Col.

i’m looking for a sensible “way” of writing my code, so its readable, modifiable, builds an object/array thats easily callable, etc… “good coding style!” 🙂

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@Adam – They do actually… and contain slashes as well…

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@Alix – Freaking marvelous man! THat was GOOD! would you also happen to have any insights on how I can “truncate” the rsultant array by removing everything from “key_x” and beyond? Should i open that as a new question?

Answer 1

Here is my take at it:

somefile.txt:

NAMEA                   valuea
NAMEB                   valueb

PHP Code:

$file = file_get_contents('./somefile.txt');
$string = preg_replace('~^(.+?)\s+(.+?)$~m', '$1=$2', $file);
$string = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n"), '&', $string);

$result = array();

parse_str($string, $result);

echo '<pre>';
print_r($result);
echo '</pre>';

Output:

Array
(
    [NAMEA] => valuea
    [NAMEB] => valueb
)

You may also be able to further simplify this by using str_getcsv() on PHP 5.3+.

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EDIT: My previous version fails for keys that have spaces like @Col. Shrapnel noticed. I didn’t read the question with enough attention. A possible solution since you seem to be using keys that always have : appended is this:

$string = preg_replace('~^(.+?):\s+(.+?)$~m', '$1=$2', $file);

To remove everything from key_x to the end of the file you can do something like this:

$string = substr($string, 0, strpos($string, 'key_x'));

So the whole thing would look like this:

somefile.txt:

Registration Number:                   valuea
Applicant Name:                   valueb

PHP Code:

$file = file_get_contents('./somefile.txt');
$string = substr($file, 0, strpos($file, 'key_x'));
$string = preg_replace('~^(.+?):\s+(.+?)$~m', '$1=$2', $string);
$string = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n"), '&', $string);

$result = array();

parse_str($string, $result);

echo '<pre>';
print_r($result);
echo '</pre>';

Output:

Array
(
    [Registration_Number] => valuea
    [Applicant_Name] => valueb
)