Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 08/15/06 11:38

Ørjan Langbakk wrote:
> Den 15.08.2006 04:22, skriblet Jerry Stuckle følgende:
>
>>
>> You're going to want to extract at least 2 values - the item number
>> and the price. Otherwise, what happens if, for instance, the first
>> line got deleted? You might be selling a $75,000 Jaguar for $0.75.
>
>
> Nope. I'll want to extract ONE value :)
>
> You see, the CSV-file in question is the basis for the product
> categories - if something gets deleted, it will show up pretty soon on
> the screen, so to speak - not to forget that using XHTML 1.0 Strict, any
> parsing error will make the page break - which in turn of course will
> show that there is an error. So, how do I, simply, extract everything
> that is placed behind the _last_ comma in a CSV-file? As the price
> itself isn't a set size (it varies from several prices, to only one, so
> the length is fairly unpredictable). I will want to make this possible
> to extract into several files.
>

Very dangerous. And sooner or later it will fail. But you'll have to
explain it to the boss/customer, not me.

> As it is now, I have one page detailing each of the product categories.
> These pages loads the appropriate CSV-file, and lists it's values as a
> table.
>

OK, no problem there.

> Now, in the CSV-files, I've got everything from 6 to 60 products - maybe
> more as the time goes by. What I need to do is something like extract
> the value that is stored in the last field (after the last comma) into
> several files.
>

If you keep it in a csv file, you'll have read the entire file and parse
each line. You can't get just "everything after the last comma". But
for 60 items this would be minimal time.

>> Using require_once is easy - but it means you have to parse the entire
>> file. If it's long, that might be a problem. A csv file requires you
>> to parse every line until you get to the one you want (unless you have
>> fixed length blocks of data, random access will not work).
>
>
> Well. I tried the require_once suggestion, and ran into trouble as the
> price I'm trying to parse, is set into the CSV-file where I get the rest
> of my data. For some reason the php-code I put in the appropriate field
> in the CSV won't parse. I'm thinking maybe it's a quote-error somewhere,
> or maybe it's in the way I parse the CSV into the html-file. I don't know.
>

No, you won't be able to do it in a .CSV file. If the extension isn't
..php (or others, as your webserver may have set up), the server won't
parse the PHP code. And the rest will be output as text.

To use require_once, you'll have to build a file with PHP code as
mootmail indicated.

> And, besides, I still need to get ONLY the value from the price-field
> into the singelpage product descriptions. Which I have NO clue as to how
> to do with CSV.
>

Check out fgetcsv().

> The best way would be to just have a single file with all the prices,
> and call up an arrayparameter in BOTH the CSV-file and the singlepage
> product description - but as I already said, the php-code in the
> CSV-file doesn't parse. It just sits in the source code when I'm looking
> into it - which tells med that the server doesn't see it as php at all,
> but as pure tekst, or something - it's not visible, so I'm guessing it
> interprets it at comments or something.
>

And as I explained, it won't.

> Is there a way, or some tips as to what to look for, when it comes to
> parsing php-code in CSV-files?
>

Read up on fgetcsv().

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
==================

[Back to original message]