Re: formating text to insert in to database

> i have a large text file i need to format in a way that i can insert it > into a database so its sorted properly. > > the text file looks something like this: > > string1 string2 string3 string4 string5 > > > how can i get these strings out so i can insert them in to the database? Assuming the space (and/or newline) is your significant delimiter, you could do this. $path = '/full/path/to/text/file'; $file = fopen($path, 'r') or die("Could not open $path"); while (!feof($file)){ $line = fgets($file, 1024); #larger number may be good... $strings = explode(' ', $line); while (list(,$string) = each($strings)){ $string = addSlashes($string); $query = "insert into string_table (string) values('$string')"; mysql_query($query) or die($query); } } If sometimes there are multiple spaces, you will want to verify that $string is non-empty. If characters other than space are delimiters, you may want to look at http://php.net/strtok rather than explode(). If performance is an issue, you might be able to create a single insert with multiple rows (I forget how) and "batch" the queries to reduce the number of queries... You'd have to experiment to see what is a good number of strings to batch together without running into trouble with overly large strings degrading PHP and/or overflowing the query buffer limit.