Parsing a TXT file

[Courtman]

Hi there,

I am trying to convert a text file [weather.noaa.gov...] into the welcome page of my website (which is currently .htm). I'd like to strip the date/time line off and just leave the second line on, and then alter the font to be the same as my site.

Does anyone know how I can do this?

Thanks in advance!

[edited by: jatar_k at 5:18 pm (utc) on April 27, 2004]
[edit reason] linked up url [/edit]

[barn_de]

Hi Courtman,

i'm sure there is a better solution, but this works so far:

<?

$fp = fopen('http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/EGGW.TXT', 'r');

while(!feof($fp)) {
$sContent .= fgets($fp, 4096);
}
fclose($fp);

$aLines = explode("\n", $sContent);

echo '<font face="verdana">' . $aLines[1] . '</font>';

?>

[coopster]

Another option is PHP's file function...

$lines = file [php.net]('http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/EGGW.TXT'); 
print $lines[1];

[Netizen]

You could do

$dataArray=file('http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/EGGW.TXT');

and then print $dataArray[1] within your page in the appropriate place.

[Courtman]

barn_de,

Thanks - that works fine. One more question, is there a way to strip the first 5 characters from the line as well... It will make organising the output on the page much easier.

Thanks for your help in advance, I've been going round in circles on this for days!

[Netizen]

If you want to strip the first 5 characters then take a look at substr [php.net].

$newString=substr($oldString,5);

Hope that helps.

[Courtman]

Perfect, it all works a treat! Many thanks for your help!

[Courtman]

One more question, I've got another file which may be multiple lines [weather.noaa.gov ]. Again I need to strip the first line, then leave the rest in with the line breaks.... is this done the same way or is there a more complex parse method?

Thanks for your help on this, I'm very new to PHP but am slowly coming to terms with its power!

[Courtman]

Better still, can I remove the line breaks in the code after stripping the first line and just leave it as one line of code which will then be displayed on the page...

[mykel79]

The file() function reads the whole file into an array, one line at a time. So you can still use the same parse method. If you want to strip the line breaks, once again you can use the the str_replace function.
str_replace("\n","",$variable)

For each line before printing it out.

[Netizen]

I would do this like:

$dataArray=file('http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/shorttaf/stations/EGGW.TXT');

$lineToShow=implode(' ',array_slice [php.net]($dataArray,1));

which gives you all the lines in the array apart from the first one and join the lines together with a space.