php - Process very big csv file without timeout and memory error

Question

At the moment I'm writing an import script for a very big CSV file. The Problem is most times it stops after a while because of an timeout or it throws an memory error.

My Idea was now to parse the CSV file in "100 lines" steps and after 100 lines recall the script automatically. I tried to achieve this with header (location ...) and pass the current line with get but it didn't work out as I want to.

Is there a better way to this or does someone have an idea how to get rid of the memory error and the timeout?

Answer 1

I've used fgetcsv to read a 120MB csv in a stream-wise-manner (is that correct english?). That reads in line by line and then I've inserted every line into a database. That way only one line is hold in memory on each iteration. The script still needed 20 min. to run. Maybe I try Python next time… Don't try to load a huge csv-file into an array, that really would consume a lot of memory.

// WDI_GDF_Data.csv (120.4MB) are the World Bank collection of development indicators:
// http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators
if(($handle = fopen('WDI_GDF_Data.csv', 'r')) !== false)
{
    // get the first row, which contains the column-titles (if necessary)
    $header = fgetcsv($handle);

    // loop through the file line-by-line
    while(($data = fgetcsv($handle)) !== false)
    {
        // resort/rewrite data and insert into DB here
        // try to use conditions sparingly here, as those will cause slow-performance

        // I don't know if this is really necessary, but it couldn't harm;
        // see also: http://php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php
        unset($data);
    }
    fclose($handle);
}