Zend Framework 2 - How to Display CSV file content in Controller as an Array

Question

I am trying to display csv data to array or something as an output using Zend Framework 2

I have created "hello world" module and the controller calls works fine.

CSV File location is data/csv/Foo.csv

Below is my contoller :

public function indexAction()
{
  $filename = 'data/csv/Foo.csv';
  $useFirstRecordAsHeader = true;
  $delimiter = ',';
  $enclosure = '"';
  $escape = '\\';
  $this->file = new SplFileObject($filename);
  $this->file->setFlags(SplFileObject::READ_CSV | SplFileObject::READ_AHEAD | SplFileObject::SKIP_EMPTY | SplFileObject::DROP_NEW_LINE);

  $this->file->setCsvControl($delimiter, $enclosure, $escape);

  $this->useFirstRecordAsHeader = $useFirstRecordAsHeader;

   return $this;

}

But right now I am getting the error:

SplFileObject::__construct(csv/Foo.csv): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

My csv file is in the same folder controller/csv/Foo.csv

So how to read csv file content and display as output array or any other format? I want to do it using Zend Framework 2 only.

Answer 1

You are trying to open $this->file = new SplFileObject('csv/Foo.csv'); , since you are using a relative path, on execution time that wont resolve to the folder where your controller is at (it will probably resolve to [yourprojectroot]/csv/Foo.csv ).

If you really wanted to store this csv in controller/csv , you should use something like:

 $this->file = new SplFileObject(dirname(__FILE__) . '/csv/Foo.csv');

But, saving that csv there is bad for a several reasons. First you'd need to grant write permission to your webserver to be able to write in that directory, and you'd be fundamentally messing up with your data/code structure (data and code shouldn't reside together, but in easily separated silos).

Better, create a folder "data" and and another folder "csv" in your projects directory, give your webserver permission to write there ( chmod || chown , other methods ), and do something like:

 $file = 'data'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'csv' . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'Foo.csv' ;
 $this->file = new SplFileObject($file );

Besides that, I'm not sure what you are returning actually makes sense. Try something like:

public function indexAction()
{
    $filename = 'data' . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'csv' . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'Foo.csv';;
    $this->file = new SplFileObject($filename);
    $this->file->setFlags(SplFileObject::READ_CSV | SplFileObject::READ_AHEAD | SplFileObject::SKIP_EMPTY | SplFileObject::DROP_NEW_LINE);

    $this->file->setCsvControl(',', '""', '\\');
    $this->useFirstRecordAsHeader = true;

    $response = $this->getResponse();
    $headers  = $response->getHeaders();
    $headers->addHeaderLine('Content-Type', 'text/csv');

    $contents = $this->file->fread($this->file->getSize());

    $response->setContent($contents);
    return $response;
}

Answer 2

You should not put your csv directory in the Controller directory, as it is not a controller. It's against the MVC architecture. The good practise is to put data in the data directory, under your root directory, at the same level as your module directory.

So assuming you have it on this data directory, you can simply write:

$this->file = new SplFileObject('data/csv/Foo.csv');

or better (for portability):

$filename = 'data'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'csv' . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'Foo.csv' ;
$this->file = new SplFileObject($filename );