Preserved Topic: Pulling Flat Text Files.

I have asked many questions on this topic and I apologize to anybody who this sounds repetative to. What i am trying to do is pull info from a flat text file. I am just wondering the capabilities of this. The php book i have does not explain this. Im looking to pull info or layout elements from it, to make less coding. anybody got any ideas?

"Society, we all know that somethings wrong. And we've know it all along" -Pennywise-

Could you be a little more specific about the info in the text file, and what you want to do with it.

- Resolutions, Of All My Fruitless Searches -

If you have fixed width columns, unpack() is your friend.
If you have delimited columns, split() is your friend.

And I'm always your friend.

Linear you must deal with flat-text far too often

I wind up having to parse things a lot that came out of a mainframe, and turn them into non-crap. Those COBOL jocks have a difficult time with anything but text, and that's difficult enough for them. They don't have regular expressions, in-place editing, fancy quoting operators, or the other niceties that Perl gives programmers.

>They don't have regular expressions, in-place editing, fancy quoting
>operators, or the other niceties that Perl gives programmers.

Yeah, but man do they have sub-record types and descriptions.
I dealt with off-shore credit card settlements for an e-commerce company
for a couple years... Had to write java classes to parse those puppies.
If I ever hear "Hey Kev, new FDR report" again from down the hall...