I need a person who can do php

Legacy_user

Hi guys and girls,

I need the help of a person who can help me write a very simple php program to do some basic text file manipulation.

I have some large (ie 10,000+ lines) files that contain the format of:

Description|URL

Now what I need to do is take these files and remove the description and insert a string like the following:

[counter].html|URL

So its basically replacing the description with an incremented counter, followed by .html if you follow.

I have very little coding experience. Any help would be appreciated.

ihatepasswords

I can code PHP to a fairly basic standard so if nobody else with more experience than me volunteers then PM me and I'll give it a go. It sounds easy enough but I'm not promising anything!

ihatepasswords

Oh, one other thing.

If you have an editor like Vi or ViM (both freeware I believe) you should be able to do this simply by opening the file with that and then using the search and replace option, it does have regex support I believe.

Easier than writing a program to do it, assuming it is possible using Vi etc.

Soulistic

I agree with "ihatepasswords"... just get a good editor to do it for you. I would recommend Notepad++ as it does syntax highlighting for all different code bases, and allows you to do a quick search and replace option.

kally

I assume that because you're thinking of using PHP, you've got access to Linux. In which case, what you want to achieve can be done using "awk" because your require each line to have a incremental counter. Here is the awk script (store this in a file called test.awk)

BEGIN {a=1;FS="|"}
{print "["a++"].html|"$1;}

Then run this from the command line as follows:

awk -f test.awk "your input file"

I've assumed that in your input file the "|" occurs only once, if this isn't the case then then script won't work.

irnbru_2

kally wrote:

I assume that because you're thinking of using PHP, you've got access to Linux.

PHP runs fine on Windows.

DrBenway

ihatepasswords wrote:

Oh, one other thing.

If you have an editor like Vi or ViM (both freeware I believe) you should be able to do this simply by opening the file with that and then using the search and replace option, it does have regex support I believe.

Easier than writing a program to do it, assuming it is possible using Vi etc.

You can do it with vi

There is a plugin called increment.vim available at vim.org by stanislav sitar (thanks) which i normally use for adding line numbers.

I edited the plugin to add the line:

let g:I =g:I . ".html|"

before the return function. reloaded vim, open a copy of your file and then use this command:

:1,$:s/.*|/\=INC(1)/g