带有不规则空格和制表符的文件按列分割/爆炸

Question

So I have a very old file with thousands of lines (I guess generated by hand) and I'm trying to move them into a rdb, but the lines don't have a format/pattern to convert into columns. Say for example the lines in the file looks like:

blah   blahsdfas    laslkdlasdj      aksdjla
sldks  slslsl      lsdlksldj           lsdjlfslk

I could say it has four fields when I look at it, primarily tried using awk but it wasn't printing the column as expected because the space between a column is not tab or with an equal space count.

You guys think its possible to extract? If yes can someone help with a php snippet?

Answer 1

Using preg_split(), you can break the line up using one or more whitespace characters as the delimiters:

$lines = file('filename', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES);
foreach($lines as $line)
{
    $pieces = preg_split('/\s+/', $line);
    // do something with pieces
}