CSVs without quotes not working with fgetcsv
Question
I'm trying to parse CSV files uploaded by the user through PHP, but it's not working properly.
I've uploaded several properly formatted CSVs and it worked fine, however; I have many users trying to import CSV files exported from Excel and they are having problems. I've compared the files to mine and noticed that the Excel files all lack quotes around the entries. Aside from that, they are identical. If I open it and save it with Open Office, without making any changes at all it works. So I'm fairly certain it's related to the quotes.
My question is; how do I read these improperly formatted CSVs?
UPDATE: Cause has been found!
This is specific to the Mac version of Excel. Line breaks are handled differently on Macs for some arbitrary reason, so before using fgetcsv, you should do this;
ini_set('auto_detect_line_endings',TRUE);
Solution
This is specific to the Mac version of Excel. Line breaks are handled differently on Macs for some arbitrary reason, so before using fgetcsv, you should do this;
ini_set('auto_detect_line_endings',TRUE);
OTHER TIPS
Looking at the manual page of fgetcsv
, its prototype looks like this :
array fgetcsv ( resource $handle [, int $length
[, string $delimiter = ',' [, string $enclosure = '"'
[, string $escape = '\\' ]]]] )
The default value for $enclosure
(i.e. the 4th parameter) is a double-quote.
What if you try specifying that you don't want any enclosure, specifying an empty string for that 4th parameter ?
(Of course, this might break what's now working -- which means you'd have to deal with two separate cases : files with fields enclosed in double-quotes, and files that couldn't be read by the first case)