Re: Help and advice sought - search/replace

In article <FBEIKNNDFEJJJJBGOGKEEEPLEFAA.solja@gci.net>, solja@gci.net says... > Just looking for a pointer or functions I can use to do this... > > I have a spreadsheet with a couple thousand entries that I'll be using for > populating a MySQL database. The spreadsheet has names listed in "last, > first" - the database I'll be populating has separate fields for first and > last names. > > I exported the names column from the spreadsheet in tab-delimited format and > I figured I could come up with a quick PHP script that would open the text > file, find each instance of ", ", take all that's before that delimiter and > move it after all that's after that delimiter, inserting a tab in between. > So "last, first" would become "first[tab]last". > > So far, I've gotten: > <?php > $filename = "NAMES.txt"; //name the file... > $fp = fopen($filename,"r+"); //open it... > echo "Reading $filename..."; > > $contents = fread($filename, filesize($filename)); //read it... > > $names = explode("\n", $contents); > > foreach($names as $name); > echo "$name<br>"; > > fclose($filename); > ?> > > Obviously, I've written in some stuff just so I can see what I'm doing, the > echo in the foreach for example. But I'm stuck on what to use to actually > separate and rewrite each $name. I'm assuming I'll have to create a while() > or for() loop and use a regular expression for this? I'm not sure where to > look. Any help would be great - just so I won't have to go in and manually > separate first and last names. Thanks! > > Jason Soza Off the top of my head (pseudocode): Read the file into an array with file() foreach element explode on tab select name field explode on comma extract last, first fields and write to... done Cheers -- David Robley Temporary Kiwi! Quod subigo farinam