PHP to the rescue

Greetings all,

We recently purchased a business listing from certified-lists to aid in our project-contact marketing effort. They supplied us with a niche list for a reasonable price.

The list is provided in CSV format, however our lead designer was still spending a lot of time creating the mailing labels. Our lead engineer threw together a quick PHP script to take the mailing fields and combine them into one cell. This improved the copy and paste time for our mailing label maker.

Here's a copy of the script:

/*  Quick script to take particular CSV fields
    and arrange them into a single cell.
    
    When:       Who:   What:
    -----       ----   -----
    13-Feb-07   BJS    Created. 
*/


function stripQuotes(&$str)
{
    $tmpStr = explode("\"", $str);
    if ( isset($tmpStr[1]) )
        $str = $tmpStr[1];
    else
        $str = $tmpStr[0];
}


$fHandle = fopen("text_list.csv", "r"); /* open for reading */
$cHandle = fopen("new_list.csv",  "w"); /* open and truncate for writing */
$newCSV  = '';
//$count= 0;
while (! feof($fHandle) )
{
        $lineStr = fgets($fHandle, 2048);
        list(   $executiveName,
                $tmp,
                $companyName,
                $address,
                $tmp,
                $city,
                $state,
                $zipCode,
                $zipFour) = explode(",", $lineStr);

        stripQuotes($executiveName);
        stripQuotes($companyName);
        stripQuotes($address);
        stripQuotes($city);
        stripQuotes($state);
        stripQuotes($zipCode);
        stripQuotes($zipFour);

        $newCSV .= "\"$executiveName $companyName $address "
                . "$city $state $zipCode-$zipFour\"\n";
        /*        
        if ( $count > 2)
            exit;
        $count++;
        echo $newCSV;
        */
}

fwrite($cHandle, $newCSV);

fclose($cHandle);
fclose($fHandle);                         

?>

It takes the desired fields, (everything except $tmp on the list( ) = explode) and builds them into a new CSV file, this time all in the same cell.

That wraps it up for today..thank you PHP!

- psl