Voting

The Note You're Voting On

13 years ago
I needed to read CSV files into associative arrays with column headers as keys. Then I ran into a problem when you have empty columns at the end of a row because array_combine returns false if both arrays don't have the same number of elements. This function based on quecoder at gmail's combine_arr() below allowed me to pad either array or not when parsing my CSVs to arrays.
$a is the array of header columns and $b is an array of the current row retrieved with fgetcsv()

<?php

function array_combine_special($a, $b, $pad = TRUE) {
    $acount = count($a);
    $bcount = count($b);
    // more elements in $a than $b but we don't want to pad either
    if (!$pad) {
        $size = ($acount > $bcount) ? $bcount : $acount;
        $a = array_slice($a, 0, $size);
        $b = array_slice($b, 0, $size);
    } else {
        // more headers than row fields
        if ($acount > $bcount) {
            $more = $acount - $bcount;
            // how many fields are we missing at the end of the second array?
            // Add empty strings to ensure arrays $a and $b have same number of elements
            $more = $acount - $bcount;
            for($i = 0; $i < $more; $i++) {
                $b[] = "";
            }
        // more fields than headers
        } else if ($acount < $bcount) {
            $more = $bcount - $acount;
            // fewer elements in the first array, add extra keys        
            for($i = 0; $i < $more; $i++) {
                $key = 'extra_field_0' . $i;
                $a[] = $key;
            }
            
        }
    }
    
    return array_combine($a, $b);
}
?>
<< Back to user notes page