On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 12:12 -0400, Paul M Foster wrote: > On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 08:57:00AM -0700, Tommy Pham wrote: > > <snip> > > > > > Personally, I find working with fixed widths is best. The text file > > might be larger but I don't have worry about escaping any type of > > characters ;) > > I find this impossible, since I never know the largest width of all the > fields in a file. And a simple explode() call allows pulling all the > fields into an array, based on a common delimiter. > > Paul > > -- > Paul M. Foster > Explode won't work in the case of a comma in a field value. Also, newlines can exist within a field value, so a line in the file doesn't equate to a row of data The best way is just to start parsing at the beginning of the file and break it into fields one by one from there. The bit I don't like about characters other than a comma being used in a "comma separated values" file is that you can't automatically tell what character has been used as the delimiter. Hence being asked by spreadsheet programs what the delimiter is if a comma doesn't give up what it recognises as valid fields. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
