If your list looks like this: " Salo, Mika Räikkönen, Kimi Häkkinen, Mika "
And there is no other commas in the list, you can do it something like this: <? $commaSeparatedList = join("\n", file("NAMES.txt")); $tabSeparatedList = preg_replace(", ", "\t", $commaSeparatedList); $arrayOfTabSepList = explode("\n", $tabSeparatedList); ?> I think that'll do. I didn't test it thou.. :) Niklas -----Original Message----- From: Jason Soza [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 27. kesäkuuta 2002 7:42 To: PHP-General Mailing List Subject: [PHP] Help and advice sought - search/replace Just looking for a pointer or functions I can use to do this... I have a spreadsheet with a couple thousand entries that I'll be using for populating a MySQL database. The spreadsheet has names listed in "last, first" - the database I'll be populating has separate fields for first and last names. I exported the names column from the spreadsheet in tab-delimited format and I figured I could come up with a quick PHP script that would open the text file, find each instance of ", ", take all that's before that delimiter and move it after all that's after that delimiter, inserting a tab in between. So "last, first" would become "first[tab]last". So far, I've gotten: <?php $filename = "NAMES.txt"; //name the file... $fp = fopen($filename,"r+"); //open it... echo "Reading $filename..."; $contents = fread($filename, filesize($filename)); //read it... $names = explode("\n", $contents); foreach($names as $name); echo "$name<br>"; fclose($filename); ?> Obviously, I've written in some stuff just so I can see what I'm doing, the echo in the foreach for example. But I'm stuck on what to use to actually separate and rewrite each $name. I'm assuming I'll have to create a while() or for() loop and use a regular expression for this? I'm not sure where to look. Any help would be great - just so I won't have to go in and manually separate first and last names. Thanks! Jason Soza -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php ########################################### This message has been scanned by F-Secure Anti-Virus for Internet Mail. For more information, connect to http://www.F-Secure.com/ ########################################### This message has been scanned by F-Secure Anti-Virus for Internet Mail. For more information, connect to http://www.F-Secure.com/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php