note 77820 added to function.php-strip-whitespace

I was given a report that was separated by spaces and asked to make graphs from it. I needed to turn the report data into a csv in memory so I could manipulate it further. First needed to see the report, then need to strip out the whitespace, but leave one space between each item that I could convert to a column. There were lots of complicated ways to do this. I stumbled on something simple. Say the report looks like this: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday 1 5 7 8 10 7 8 7 15 4 0 21 4 12 9 5 7 9 0 9 43 The report is using spaces and not tabs to separate everything. Assume it's a file called data.txt you can use the following to strip out the spaces and make it comma delimited: <?php $handle = @fopen("data.txt", "r"); if ($handle) { while (!feof($handle)) { $buffer = fgets($handle, 4096); // this will search for 5 spaces and replace with 1, then 4, then 3, then 2 // then only one will be left. Replace that one space with a comma // then output with nl2br so you can see the line breaks print nl2br(str_replace(" ", ",",ereg_replace( ' ', ' ',ereg_replace( ' ', ' ', ereg_replace( ' ', ' ', ereg_replace( ' ',' ',$buffer )))))); } } fclose($handle); ?> Hope that helps someone else. ---- Server IP: 216.235.15.211 Probable Submitter: 68.147.110.13 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.php-strip-whitespace.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/77820 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/77820/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/77820/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/77820/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/77820/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/77820/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/77820/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/77820 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/77820 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php