In addition to the simple fgets() function, PHP also offers the more-sophisticated fgetcsv() function, which not only reads in data from a file, but also parses each line and, using the comma (,) symbol as delimiter, splits the data on each line into fields for further processing. The return value from every call to fgetcsv() is an array containing the fields found.

An example might make this clearer. Consider the following CSV file,

  john,67,John Doe,India

  sue,32,Sue Me,New York

  sarah,10,Sarah Whu,Korea

  ramu,23,R Amulet,London

  

and this PHP script, which reads it and displays the information within it as an XML document:

  <?php

// open XML tags

  echo "<?xml version='1.0'?>";

  echo "<collection>";
// set file to read

  $filename = "users.txt";
// open file

  $fh = fopen ($filename, "r") or die("Could not open file");
// read file

  while (!feof($fh)) 

  {

  // create XML structure

  echo "<user>";

  $fields = fgetcsv($fh, 1000);

  echo "<username>" . $fields[0] . "</username>";

  echo "<fullname>" . $fields[2] . "</fullname>";

  echo "<age>" . $fields[1] . "</age>";

  echo "<city>" . $fields[3] . "</city>";

  echo "</user>";

  }
// close file

  fclose ($fh);
echo "</collection>";
?>

  

In this case, the comma-separated values in the input file are automatically parsed into an array, and can then be processed, or reassembled in any order you like, to create different output. Here's what the script above results in:

<?xml version='1.0'?> <collection><user><username>john</username><fullname> John
Doe</fullname><age>67</age><city>India</city> </user><user><username>sue</use
rname><fullname>Sue Me</fullname><age>32</age><city>New
York</city> </user><user><username>sarah</username><fullname> Sarah
Whu</fullname><age>10</age><city>Korea</city> </user><user><username>ramu</us
ername><fullname> R
Amulet</fullname><age>23</age><city>London</city> </user></collection>