How to remove linebreaks from a csv file? 2

[dcnguyen]

I converted a database to csv format and found out that some of the textfields have irregular line breaks. For example, the ideal format would be:

"Apple", "10", "There were ten apples in the orchard"


What some of the entries end up being are:

"Apple", "10", "There are ten
apples in the
orchard
"

Is there anyway with php that I can go through to fix these kind of irregular entries? I was hoping doing a fgetcsv would preserve the original columns, but I get a result like:

Array(
[0]=>"Apple"
[1]=>"10"
[2]=>"There are ten
)
Array(
[0]=>apples in the
)
Array(
[0]=>orchard
)
Array(
[0]=>"
)

 

[vacunita]

You could try something like:

$nolinebreaks=str_replace("\n\r"," ",$csvfilecontents);

But it's going to be hard to distinguish the incorrect line breaks from the correct ones.






----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[jpadie]

fgetcsv will work just fine. you just need to give it the right parameters

$fh = fopen("somefile.txt");

while ( ($row = fgetcsv($fh, 2084, ',', '"') !== false){
  //do stuff
}

remember to convert the line breaks to <br> tags if you want to preserve them within an html block. use nl2br() for this.

 

[jpadie]

@vacunita

should it not be "\r\n" ?

 

[vacunita]

Right sorry my mistake. [red] \r\n. [/red]

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[dcnguyen]

Thanks all, for the help. I used a combination of the two...using fgetcsv to split the fields properly, then using str_replace to weed out the linebreaks in the affected field. I found that I had to delimit my file differently...that is, I used pipes to delimit, and ^ to set off text blocks...Using quotation marks caused problems since some of the text entries had quotation marks (and MSAcess wasn't escaping them)

 

[jpadie]

for compatibility with excel etc you might be better served with cleansing the data (i.e. escaping it). it's a once only process, of course and would not be difficult