Developer’s manual

Reading a flat file using the CSV connector service becomes a really easy task. The first step is to get the proper service object:

$services = \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\ExtensionManagementUtility::findService('connector', 'csv');
if ($services === false) {
        // Issue an error
} else {
        $connector = \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\GeneralUtility::makeInstanceService('connector', 'csv');
}

On the first line, you get a list of all services that are of type “connector” and subtype “csv”. If the result if false, it means no appropriate services were found and you probably want to issue an error message.

On the contrary you are assured that there’s at least one valid service and you can get an instance of it by calling \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\GeneralUtility::makeInstanceService() .

The next step is simply to call the appropriate method from the API – with the right parameters – depending on which format you want to have in return. For a PHP array:

$parameters = [
        'filename' => 'path/to/your/file',
        'delimiter' => “\t”,
        'text_qualifier' => '',
        'encoding' => 'utf-8',
        'skip_rows' => 1,
];
$data = $connector->fetchArray($parameters);

In this example we declare the file as using tabs as delimiter and no text qualifier. Furthermore the file is declared as being encoded in UTF-8 and its first line should be ignored.

Let’s assume the file looks something like this:

last_name       first_name
Wellington      Nicholas
Oshiro  Ki
Duncan  Dwayne

The resulting array stored in $data in the example above will be:

last_name	first_name
Wellington	Nicholas
Oshiro	Ki
Duncan	Dwayne

The fetchRaw() method returns a two-dimensional array with one entry per line in the file and in each of these an entry per column. The fetchXML() method returns the array created by fetchArray() transformed to XML using \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\GeneralUtility::array2xml_cs().