RE: [PHP] Remove blank lines from a file

From: Anton Heuschen > On 21 May 2010 15:16, Ashley Sheridan <ash@ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote: >> On Fri, 2010-05-21 at 14:03 +0200, Anton Heuschen wrote: >> >> Hi Im trying do something like this, have a function which uploads my >> file and returns file pointer ... but at same time ... I want to >> remove all Blank lines in a file and update it before it goes to the >> final location ... >> >> What I tried was to do a write of file and use some regexp replace to >> remove a blank ... either I am not doing the replace correct or my >> understanding of the file buffer and what I can do with it between the >> browser and saving is not correct, >> >> Anyway my code looks something like this : >> >> >> $uploadfile = $this->uploaddir; >> $mtran = mt_rand(999,999999); >> $NewName = date("Ymd_Gis").$mtran.".csv"; >> $uploadfile = $uploadfile.$NewName; >> >> try{ >> if >> (move_uploaded_file($_FILES['attachfile']['tmp_name'], $uploadfile)) >> { >> $handle = fopen($uploadfile, "r+"); >> $lines = file($uploadfile, >> FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES); //FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | >> foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) { >> $line = >> preg_replace("/(^[\r\n]*|[\r\n]+)[\s\t]*[\r\n]+/", "", $line); >> if(strlen($line) > 0) >> $line=trim($line); >> $line=$line."\n"; >> fwrite($handle, $line); >> } >> fclose($handle); >> >> >> >> If the files aren't too large in size, what about using something like >> file('somefile.txt', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES); which >> should pull into an array only those lines with content, and then just write >> that back out to the same file line by line? > > I actually had that ... removed it in last example as I was trying other > stuff and it did not seem to work either ? > > $lines = file($uploadfile, FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES); //FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES > | > > > see I removed the FILE_IGNORE line - it was in earlier and only tried > FILE_SKIP_EMPTY .... but still the final file had all the spaces again ... > > So in the file it would look like (from the original file the user uploads > that is) > > 1 > 2 > > 3 > 4 > > > 5 > > 6 > > > but when the file is saved to the server it must look like > > > 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 6 > > but it never does and still looks like the first block. Are those lines actually empty, or do they have other non-printing characters in them? Isn't there a generic whitespace value that could be used in place of '\s\t'? Can you look at the output file with a binary or hex editor to see what is actually in those 'empty' lines? Does that regular expression work correctly on UTF-8 input? Bob McConnell