Filter a csv file by a word or text using php

Question

I have another csv file where I am trying to do a simple word filter. For example, my text.csv file looks something like this:

name, age, hobbies
Tom, 8, \"         


        

Answer 1

You're close. Something like this should work:

$file  = fopen('text.csv', 'r');

// You can use an array to store your search words, makes things more flexible.
// Supports any number of search words.
$words = array('wii', 'guitar');    
// Make the search words safe to use in regex (escapes special characters)
$words = array_map('preg_quote', $words);
// The argument becomes '/wii|guitar/i', which means 'wii or guitar, case-insensitive'
$regex = '/'.implode('|', $words).'/i';

while (($line = fgetcsv($file)) !== FALSE) {  
    list($name, $age, $hobbies) = $line;

    if(preg_match($regex, $hobbies)) {
        echo "$name, $age, $hobbies<br />\n";
    }
}

Answer 2

What about case insensitive searches. I'm curious to make this work amonst a list of my outlook contacts. Is there a better function to use than strtolower()??

Answer 3

It's probably worth noting here that PHP has CSV handling libraries.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php

This returns the next line of the CSV as an array e.g.

// csv file contains "col1,col2,col3"
// array = {'col1', 'col2', 'col3'}
$array = fgetcsv($csv);

Then you can simply use in_array() or a test on $array[column_number] to filter.

I'm not sure if using a regular expression on the line string vs. using array search functions would be faster though, so it's probably worth testing.