On Feb 20, 2008 3:05 AM, Richard Lynch <ceo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, February 18, 2008 12:08 pm, Graham Cossey wrote:
> > proceed accordingly... My biggest gripe with tab delimited files is
> > that they are quite a bit bigger than comma delimited files so I may
> > have to split the large files I receive into smaller 'chunks' to allow
> > them to be uploaded.
>
> This is not making sense...
>
> A tab-delimited file wil have a TAB character "\t" instead of comma ","
>
> A tab WITHIN the data then needs escaping as "\t" or somesuch.
>
> But commas to not need escaping with quotes.
>
> And quotes don't need escaping with double-quotes.
>
> So tab-delimited should be a TINY bit smaller or the same size.
>
> Perhaps your users are just uploading more data.
>
> > One thing I have noticed is that the files I create in my PHP script
> > (The script breaks a large file into smaller files of 25,000
> > records/rows each.) when opened in Excel (by double-clicking the file
> > in Windows Explorer) came up with an unrecognised file format message
> > for all files except the first. If you ignore this message the tab
> > delimited files open OK but the comma separated ones do not. The
> > "except the first" made me think that there may be something "hidden"
> > at the beginning of the file to say what type of data follows.
>
> Some CSV files include a "header" line with the names of the fields in
> the first line.
>
> This is less common in tab-delimited, but not unheard of.
>
If it's any help the data I'm getting comes out of a third party
Cognos environment.
The data opened into Textpad looks like this :
Column One Column Two Column Three Column Four Column Five Column
Six Column Seven
ABCDE XX99 DCS HORSE 1 2006 02
ABFED XX99 DCS HORSE 1 2006 02
JHGNF XX99 DCS HORSE 1 2006 02
HNDGE XX99 DCS HORSE 1 2006 02
Tab delimited no?
This file is 385KB. If I open it into Excel just by double-clicking on
it it opens fine. I then do File > Save As, change Unicode Text
(*.txt) to CSV (Comma Delimited)(*.csv) and give it a name then Save.
This new file is now 193KB and looks like this in Textpad :
Column One,Column Two,Column Three,Column Four,Column Five,Column
Six,Column Seven
ABCDE,XX99,DCS,HORSE,1,2006,2
ABFED,XX99,DCS,HORSE,1,2006,2
JHGNF,XX99,DCS,HORSE,1,2006,2
HNDGE,XX99,DCS,HORSE,1,2006,2
Double-clicking on this newly created file opens fine into Excel.
Back to my 'original' problem/question, if I '$f = fopen("$file",
"r")' and 'while ($data = fgets($f))' on the above first format and do
a $data = str_replace("\t",",",$data); the resulting file looks like
the second example above when opened into Textpad but will not open
into separate columns when opened with Excel.
I thought these were supposed to be simple, basic flat text formats
that were universally accepted, guess I'm just naive ;-)
I'm on the verge of simply giving in, and continuing to Open & Save As
the 100+ files I have to process in the next week or so :-(
--
Graham
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
