PHP in_array() does not find content that is in an array

Question

i have a very simple script that reads out a txt file, puts the content in an array.

Which does perfectly, i can do print_r($array) ; and it outputs all the data.

My script:

<?php

$file = 'countries.txt';
$countries_output = file_get_contents($file);

$countries_pieces = explode("\n", $countries_output);

if (in_array("Sweden", $countries_pieces)) {
   echo "Sweden was found";
}
else 
{
echo'NOT FOUND';
}
print_r($countries_pieces);
?>

I don't understand why it doesn't find the value 'Sweden' in my array, when it clearly is in there.

This is the output: https://pastebin.com/z9rC9Qvk

I also print_r the array, so you can see that 'Sweden' is indeed in the array.

Hope someone can help :)

Answer 1

There is most likely new line characters that you're not taking into account. The following is a cleaner solution using file() and should work for you:

$file = 'countries.txt';
$countries_pieces = file($file, FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES);

if (in_array("Sweden", $countries_pieces)) {
   echo "Sweden was found";
} else {
    echo'NOT FOUND';
}

If there are still some issues, a common normalization is to trim() values to remove some left-overs:

$countries_pieces = array_map('trim', $countries_pieces);

But this must not cure all issues.

Answer 2

Is countries.txt from a Windows machine? If so, splitting on '\\n' won't work very well since there's also a '\\r' for every line.

Your print_r output would seem to indicate that since there seems to be an extra newline between every line of output.