Parsing Text File

[gigantorTRON]

Hello,

I'm working with a text file that contains the names of websites and their corresponding URLs in the following fashion:

<a href="www.cnn.com">CNN News</a>

Each site and title is separated by line breaks. I'm not very experienced with fopen, fread, etc. and was wondering if anyone could give me pointers on how to go about reading the text file line by line and saving the URL and title in separate columns in a database.

 

Oh, and one more thing. The categories of these sites are also included every so often. I was hoping to save the category in a third field. Ex:

 

News (\n new line here)
<a href="www.cnn.com">CNN News</a> (\n)
<a href="www.bbc.com">BBC News </a>

etc.

 

Thanks!

[thebadbad]

Here's your pointer: file().

Then you could do this (read comments):

 

<?php
$array = file('filename.txt');
foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
$url = preg_replace("/.*href=\"(.*)\">.*/", "$1", $value, 1); //retrieve URLs
$title = preg_replace("/.*\">(.*)<\/a>.*/", "$1", $value, 1); //retrieve titles
mysql_query("INSERT INTO `table` (`url`, `title`) VALUES ('$url', '$title')"); //insert into database
}
?>

 

Dunno about your last question. Didn't test the code, hope it works.

 

EDIT: Just tested without the query part, had a small error in the last preg_replace; it's corrected now.

[thebadbad]

And, to remove the extra space added to the titles/URLs (caused by line breaks some how), add an s to the first preg_replace parameter:

 

<?php
$array = file('filename.txt');
if ($array) {
foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
	$url = preg_replace("/.*href=\"(.*)\">.*/s", "$1", $value, 1); //retrieve URLs
	$title = preg_replace("/.*\">(.*)<\/a>.*/s", "$1", $value, 1); //retrieve titles
	mysql_query("INSERT INTO `table` (`url`, `title`) VALUES ('$url', '$title')"); //insert into database
}
}
?>

 

I also added a check for the file before retrieving the strings.

[thebadbad]

I won't stop, will I?

 

Made sure that the code I posted won't insert wrong stuff into the database when the category lines are passed:

 

<?php
$array = file('filename.txt');
if ($array) {
foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
	if (strpos($value, "</a>") === false) {continue;} //skip the category lines
	$url = preg_replace("/.*href=\"(.*)\">.*/s", "$1", $value, 1); //retrieve URLs
	$title = preg_replace("/.*\">(.*)<\/a>.*/s", "$1", $value, 1); //retrieve titles
	mysql_query("INSERT INTO `table` (`url`, `title`) VALUES ('$url', '$title')"); //insert into database
}
}
?>

[Barand]

slight mod to the above code to get the categories

 

<?php
$array = file('filename.txt');
if ($array) {
foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
	if (strpos($value, "</a>") === false) {
                     $cat = trim ($value);
                }
                else { 
	$url = preg_replace("/.*href=\"(.*)\">.*/s", "$1", $value, 1); //retrieve URLs
	$title = preg_replace("/.*\">(.*)<\/a>.*/s", "$1", $value, 1); //retrieve titles
	mysql_query("INSERT INTO `table` (`cat`,`url`, `title`) VALUES ('$cat', '$url', '$title')"); //insert into database
               }
}
}
?>

[thebadbad]

Can't believe I couldn't figure it out. Thanks (I wanted to learn it too)