Using curl as an alternative to fopen file resource for fgetcsv

Question

Is it possible to make curl, access a url and the result as a file resource? like how fopen does it.

My goals:

1. Parse a CSV file
2. Pass it to fgetcsv

Answer 1

You can create a temporary file using fopen() and then fwrite() the contents into it. After that, the newly created file will be readable by fgetcsv(). The tempnam() function should handle the creation of arbitrary temporary files.

According to the comments on str_getcsv(), users without access to the command could try the function below. There are also various other approaches in the comments, make sure you check them out.

function str_getcsv($input, $delimiter = ',', $enclosure = '"', $escape = '\\', $eol = '\n') {
    if (is_string($input) && !empty($input)) {
        $output = array();
        $tmp    = preg_split("/".$eol."/",$input);
        if (is_array($tmp) && !empty($tmp)) {
            while (list($line_num, $line) = each($tmp)) {
                if (preg_match("/".$escape.$enclosure."/",$line)) {
                    while ($strlen = strlen($line)) {
                        $pos_delimiter       = strpos($line,$delimiter);
                        $pos_enclosure_start = strpos($line,$enclosure);
                        if (
                            is_int($pos_delimiter) && is_int($pos_enclosure_start)
                            && ($pos_enclosure_start < $pos_delimiter)
                            ) {
                            $enclosed_str = substr($line,1);
                            $pos_enclosure_end = strpos($enclosed_str,$enclosure);
                            $enclosed_str = substr($enclosed_str,0,$pos_enclosure_end);
                            $output[$line_num][] = $enclosed_str;
                            $offset = $pos_enclosure_end+3;
                        } else {
                            if (empty($pos_delimiter) && empty($pos_enclosure_start)) {
                                $output[$line_num][] = substr($line,0);
                                $offset = strlen($line);
                            } else {
                                $output[$line_num][] = substr($line,0,$pos_delimiter);
                                $offset = (
                                            !empty($pos_enclosure_start)
                                            && ($pos_enclosure_start < $pos_delimiter)
                                            )
                                            ?$pos_enclosure_start
                                            :$pos_delimiter+1;
                            }
                        }
                        $line = substr($line,$offset);
                    }
                } else {
                    $line = preg_split("/".$delimiter."/",$line);

                    /*
                     * Validating against pesky extra line breaks creating false rows.
                     */
                    if (is_array($line) && !empty($line[0])) {
                        $output[$line_num] = $line;
                    } 
                }
            }
            return $output;
        } else {
            return false;
        }
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

Answer 2

Assuming that by fopen is disabled you mean "allow_url_fopen is disabled", a combination of CURLOPT_FILE and php://temp make this fairly easy:

$f = fopen('php://temp', 'w+');

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FILE, $f);
// Do you need these? Your fopen() method isn't a post request
// curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
// curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $param);
curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

rewind($f);

while ($line = fgetcsv($f)) {
  print_r($line);
}

fclose($f);

Basically this creates a pointer to a "virtual" file, and cURL stores the response in it. Then you just reset the pointer to the beginning and it can be treated as if you had opened it as usual with fopen($url, 'r');