PHP file parsing help

Thanks! That will help with sc2 files. The .rcx format is the only format the other game uses for recorded games. There is a site(rts-sanctuary) that has a really old web app that parses .rcx files and displays data from the file. Here is a screenshot of the displayed data. This kind of app would be perfect. I would just like to know how they did it so I can start learning the process.

I haven't been able to find an example of the insides of one of these files, but a parser will run through the output character by character and look for specific matches in the string. If it's a super consistent file, this should be quite easy - like CSV files, you can be almost 100% certain that all the 'good stuff' is going to be placed in a specific number of columns between commas etc...

You're probably going to want to build a nested array structure - I would start there. Try and create the perfect array structure first and then find where all that information exists in the file. If it's semi-keyed already, you could say things like: look for a new score line by matching 'score line' in the file -> inside this score line, look for a string key of 'name' -> grab all the content between the 'name' key and the next key and store it in the appropriate php array.

If it's kind, and by kind I mean super consistant, you might get away with creating one super loop structure that will grab everything over and over again until you hit the end of the file. If it's more complex, you're going to have to add more 'if else' constructs to combat the various scenarios.

Thanks for the great information. So basically, use something like file_get_contents and create an array with the data I need. Any particular courses and/or links that will help me nail down this entire process? I want to build an app that will upload a file, parse the file, display the content how I please, and give them a download option that will will allow others to download the file after it is submitted.

hmm, I personally couldn't tell you any more than google right now, but I can say you'll probably need a database to store all the data from the uploaded files - it wouldn't be great to continually parse the file for every display because you'll be putting a lot of effort into scanning unnecessary information.

Hope this gets you started :-)

I found a program called TitanTools that was created for the .NET 1.1 framework. It pulls pretty much all the info I need into a GUI display. Is there anyway I could recreate just the process of decoding the file information like this program does in a PHP environment?