Process very big csv file without timeout and memory error

Question

At the moment I\'m writing an import script for a very big CSV file. The Problem is most times it stops after a while because of an timeout or it throws an memory error.

Answer 1

I've used fgetcsv to read a 120MB csv in a stream-wise-manner (is that correct english?). That reads in line by line and then I've inserted every line into a database. That way only one line is hold in memory on each iteration. The script still needed 20 min. to run. Maybe I try Python next time… Don't try to load a huge csv-file into an array, that really would consume a lot of memory.

// WDI_GDF_Data.csv (120.4MB) are the World Bank collection of development indicators:
// http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators
if(($handle = fopen('WDI_GDF_Data.csv', 'r')) !== false)
{
    // get the first row, which contains the column-titles (if necessary)
    $header = fgetcsv($handle);

    // loop through the file line-by-line
    while(($data = fgetcsv($handle)) !== false)
    {
        // resort/rewrite data and insert into DB here
        // try to use conditions sparingly here, as those will cause slow-performance

        // I don't know if this is really necessary, but it couldn't harm;
        // see also: http://php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php
        unset($data);
    }
    fclose($handle);
}