"debugging" a tab-delimited text file.

[lifeson2112]

ok, I have a slight problem. I need to read in information from a bunch of .xls spreadsheets into my database by first converting them into tab-delimited text files, but one of the columns is full of sentences with new lines.

 

I cut that column out, put it in a separate .xls file, and made a .txt file out of it.

 

Here's some info about how my program (gnumeric) changed it:

Each column (1 column in this case) is separated by a tab (checked the file for tabs using str_replace() and there aren't any).

and there is a carriage return at the end of each row. I want to keep the carriage returns in tact so I can know how to explode the file.

 

Here's some of my code so you can see how I have attempted to do this:

<?php
$file = file("power_wheels_caption.txt");
$rows = count($file);


for($i=0; $i<$rows; $i++)
{
    $noendlines[$i] = str_replace("\n"," ", $file[$i]);
}

$implodedstring = implode(" ",$noendlines);

$captionarray = explode("\r",$implodedstring);

$newfile = fopen("temp_caption.txt", 'w') or die("could not open file");

$newrow = count($captionarray);

for($j=0; $j<$newrow; $j++)
{
    fwrite($newfile, $captionarray[$j]."\r") or die("could not open file");
}
?>

 

I am planning then to take the "temp_caption.txt", read it into gnumeric again and paste the resulting cells back into the table, where it can be whole again. This will save a lot of time if someone can help me figure this out. Thanks in advance .