Importing a large delimited file to a MySQL table
- by Tom
I have this large (and oddly formatted txt file) from the USDA's website. It is the NUT_DATA.txt file.
But the problem is that it is almost 27mb! I was successful in importing the a few other smaller files, but my method was using file_get_contents which it makes sense why an error would be thrown if I try to snag 27+ mb of RAM.
So how can I import this massive file to my MySQL DB without running into a timeout and RAM issue? I've tried just getting one line at a time from the file, but this ran into timeout issue.
Using PHP 5.2.0.
Here is the old script (the fields in the DB are just numbers because I could not figure out what number represented what nutrient, I found this data very poorly document. Sorry about the ugliness of the code):
<?
$file = "NUT_DATA.txt";
$data = split("\n", file_get_contents($file)); // split each line
$link = mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "password");
mysql_select_db("database", $link);
for($i = 0, $e = sizeof($data); $i < $e; $i++)
{
$sql = "INSERT INTO `USDA` (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17) VALUES(";
$row = split("\^", trim($data[$i])); // split each line by carrot
for ($j = 0, $k = sizeof($row); $j < $k; $j++) {
$val = trim($row[$j], '~');
$val = (empty($val)) ? 0 : $val;
$sql .= ((empty($val)) ? 0 : $val) . ','; // this gets rid of those tildas and replaces empty strings with 0s
}
$sql = rtrim($sql, ',') . ");";
mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error()); // query the db
}
echo "Finished inserting data into database.\n";
mysql_close($link);
?>
