PHP read csv field contain new line in the field

Question

Let's see I have this in csv string (got it from cURL output):

"name";"gender";"address";"phone";\n
"John Doe"; "Male"; "Broke Street\n No. 69 South Pole";"911";\n

Something like that, I use explode to get to line by line, however there is a field that also use \n for new line thus mess up my array index. How can I workaround this, any idea?

Edited the actual csv content I got which has double quote on field. — Ardeus
– Ardeus, Commented Sep 3, 2012 at 3:29

Marc B · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-03 03:13:26Z

2

That's a badly generated/corrupted .csv, in that case. If a field contains line breaks, then it should be surrounded by " so the csv parser can tell a line-break-to-start-new-record apart from line-break-inside-a-field-just-to-make-a-new-line apart.

Fix whatever's generating the csv, rather than trying to handle the garbage it's spitting out.

answered Sep 3, 2012 at 3:13

Marc B

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3 Comments

Ardeus Over a year ago

I forgot to mention, the csv field is actually enveloped by double quotes, which I remove it with str_replace thus it leaves with that clean data atm. I will edit my post. So what csv parser should I use, the php str_getcsv?

Marc B Over a year ago

that means you're corrupting the csv yourself. stop massaging the data before it's been parsed.

Ardeus Over a year ago

The reason because it works if the value has no containing new line or delimiter. So its as easy as using str_replace and explode to get the job done. Now if you are referring to str_getcsv($output,"\n",'"') or without enclosure param, the parser still fail to recognize the \n inside the field is not for new row line.

adamsmith · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-03 03:20:48Z

0

In your case, that's a malformed csv.

Actually you may use preg_match_all to parse that file, without caring whether it's a csv or not.

eg: preg_match('#([^;]+);([^;]+);([^;]+);([^;]+)\s?#', $csv_file_content, $matches);

answered Sep 3, 2012 at 3:20

adamsmith

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Ardeus · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-07 08:18:42Z

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Atm Im using str_replace to replace '";\n' to '";#n' or to something else you like and use explode to split #n delimiter to get every row.

I guess thats what works for me right now.

answered Sep 7, 2012 at 8:18

Ardeus

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