Iterate over each line in a string in PHP

Solution:1

I would like to propose a significantly faster (and memory efficient) alternative: strtok rather than preg_split.

$separator = "\r\n";
$line = strtok($subject, $separator);

while ($line !== false) {
    # do something with $line
    $line = strtok( $separator );
}

Testing the performance, I iterated 100 times over a test file with 17 thousand lines: preg_split took 27.7 seconds, whereas strtok took 1.4 seconds.

Note that though the $separator is defined as "\r\n", strtok will separate on either character – and as of PHP4.1.0, skip empty lines/tokens.

See the strtok manual entry: http://php.net/strtok

Solution:2

It’s overly-complicated and ugly but in my opinion this is the way to go:

$fp = fopen("php://memory", 'r+');
fputs($fp, $data);
rewind($fp);
while($line = fgets($fp)){
  // deal with $line
}
fclose($fp);