i have a pretty long text file that i need to get into a db. The are line 1: Name, line 2: address, line 3:city, and line 4hone number. What would be the easiest way to get this into a db? would it be easier if i make them comma-delimited ?

technically the file can be read either way. I'd imagine it would be an issue to re-format the text file so your solution is to read the text file line by line, building up SQL insert statements and executing them.

// to read the text file line by line using fgets ...

// note: Returns a string of up to length - 1 bytes read from the file pointed to by handle. Reading ends when length - 1 bytes have been read, on a newline (which is included in the return value), or on EOF (whichever comes first). If no length is specified, the length defaults to 1k, or 1024 bytes.

$handle = fopen("/tmp/inputfile.txt", "r");
while (!feof($handle)) {
$buffer = fgets($handle, 4096);
echo $buffer;
}
fclose($handle);



// if the text file was in csv format using @fgetcsv ...

$fp = @fopen($_FILES['csvfile']['tmp_name'], "r") or die ("Cannot open file on server");

while(!@feof ($fp)) {
$row=@fgetcsv($fp, 1024, ",");
}

fclose($fp);

I had to do this with a bunch of text files (newspaper articles).

I used this from the command line:

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'files.txt' INTO TABLE media FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\r\n%%\r\n' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n%%%\n' (date,type,headline,text);

The \r\n stands for looking for a skip to the next line.
You can use whatever you want to separate the fields, like commas, but I chose two percent symbols on their own line, like this (since the articles had commas in them):

Date
%%
Type
%%
Headline
%%
Text
%%%
Date
%%
Headline
%%
etc.

Just make sure the file files.txt is in the same directory that you're running mysql from.

CHRIS