Using curl as an alternative to fopen file resource for fgetcsv

Question

Is it possible to make curl, access a url and the result as a file resource? like how fopen does it.

My goals:

1. Parse a CSV file
2. Pass it to fgetcsv

Answer 1

You can create a temporary file using fopen() and then fwrite() the contents into it. After that, the newly created file will be readable by fgetcsv(). The tempnam() function should handle the creation of arbitrary temporary files.

According to the comments on str_getcsv(), users without access to the command could try the function below. There are also various other approaches in the comments, make sure you check them out.

function str_getcsv($input, $delimiter = ',', $enclosure = '"', $escape = '\\', $eol = '\n') {
    if (is_string($input) && !empty($input)) {
        $output = array();
        $tmp    = preg_split("/".$eol."/",$input);
        if (is_array($tmp) && !empty($tmp)) {
            while (list($line_num, $line) = each($tmp)) {
                if (preg_match("/".$escape.$enclosure."/",$line)) {
                    while ($strlen = strlen($line)) {
                        $pos_delimiter       = strpos($line,$delimiter);
                        $pos_enclosure_start = strpos($line,$enclosure);
                        if (
                            is_int($pos_delimiter) && is_int($pos_enclosure_start)
                            && ($pos_enclosure_start < $pos_delimiter)
                            ) {
                            $enclosed_str = substr($line,1);
                            $pos_enclosure_end = strpos($enclosed_str,$enclosure);
                            $enclosed_str = substr($enclosed_str,0,$pos_enclosure_end);
                            $output[$line_num][] = $enclosed_str;
                            $offset = $pos_enclosure_end+3;
                        } else {
                            if (empty($pos_delimiter) && empty($pos_enclosure_start)) {
                                $output[$line_num][] = substr($line,0);
                                $offset = strlen($line);
                            } else {
                                $output[$line_num][] = substr($line,0,$pos_delimiter);
                                $offset = (
                                            !empty($pos_enclosure_start)
                                            && ($pos_enclosure_start < $pos_delimiter)
                                            )
                                            ?$pos_enclosure_start
                                            :$pos_delimiter+1;
                            }
                        }
                        $line = substr($line,$offset);
                    }
                } else {
                    $line = preg_split("/".$delimiter."/",$line);

                    /*
                     * Validating against pesky extra line breaks creating false rows.
                     */
                    if (is_array($line) && !empty($line[0])) {
                        $output[$line_num] = $line;
                    } 
                }
            }
            return $output;
        } else {
            return false;
        }
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}