preserving blank space padding when using fgetcsv

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

Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 16:00:05 -0500
To: PHP - General <php-general@lists.php.net>

The first time I sent this message to the list, this is what bounced back...

"Hi. This is the qmail-send program at pb1.pair.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<php-general@lists.php.net>:
This message is looping: it already has my Delivered-To line. (#5.4.6)"

So I am resending it. I apologize if anyone is getting this message twice......

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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