preserving blank space padding when using fgetcsv

From: Roger Spears (roger_at_bgnet.bgsu.edu)
Date: 12/03/03 

Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 14:06:17 -0500
To: php-general@lists.php.net

Hello,

I've been researching this for most of the day and am unable to find an
answer.

I'm using fgetcsv to read a comma delimited file (Microsoft Excel CSV).
I'm trying to create a PHP application which will read a csv file line
by line, remove the commas and preserve the padding that is in each
column. That means if a column is a fixed length of 15 characters and
the actual text in that column is only 5 characters long, the
application will preserve the extra 10 blank spaces.

I'm able to open and read the csv using fgetcsv:
$handle = fopen ($filename, "r");
while ($mpt_line = fgetcsv ($handle, filesize ($filename), ","))
{
Then I check each member of that array to make sure it is the proper
length for that column:
if (strlen($mpt_line[0])<4)
     {
     str_pad($mpt_line[0], 4, " ", STR_PAD_RIGHT);
     }
When all of the length checks are finished I remove the commas and then
print out the finished product:
}
$no_commas = str_replace(",", "", $mpt_line);
print "aa/".$no_commas[0]."/aa";

For output all I get is the actual text and no blank space padding.
Meaning that if the field contains two characters of data it should
still appear 4 characters in length. I was hoping to achieve aa/hi /aa
instead all I get is aa/hi/aa.

Thanks,
Roger

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