PHP: "non well formed numeric value encountered"

Question

<?php  
function aum($x) {
$contents = $_FILES['userfile']['tmp_name'];
$contents = file("$contents");
$aum = $contents[$x][13].$contents[$x][14].$contents[$x][15].$contents[$x][16].$contents[$x][17].$contents[$x][18].$contents[$x][19].$contents[$x][20].$contents[$x][21].$contents[$x][22].$contents[$x][23];
$faum = money_format('%(#1n',$aum)."\n";    
return $faum;
}
?>

Notice: A non well formed numeric value encountered in ./includes.php on line 28

---

Hi,

I'm getting the error above. Line 28 is: $faum = money_format('%(#1n',$aum)."\n";
I have three questions:

1. Why am I getting this error notice and what should I do to fix it?
2. Is there a better way to upload a CSV text file that has non-uniform comma separation into a HTML table? By "non-uniform" comma separation I mean: KEY DATA,DATA,,,$aum DATA,,,,,,DATA,,etc. As you can see, I am deriving $aum by using the file() function. I then count the number of characters from the right of the beginning of each row to get the fixed character number that corresponds with the $aum DATA. The $x variable corresponds to the row numbers in the file. Then I can return each $aum per row $x. I am new to PHP and would like to know if there is a smarter way to do this.

I appreciate any tips/advice that you might share.

thx,

Answer 1

You need to have a look at $aum as it probably can't be formatted as a number.

Pop

echo $aum;
echo floatval($aum);

Before the error to see what you get. You might need to change the position you're looking at if you're picking up leading or trailing data.

Answer 2

for the second question, fgetcsv is your friend to get data out of CSV files

http://ee.php.net/fgetcsv

Answer 3

For CSV parsing, a hand on approach is to use explode. I try this snippet of code

$string = "a,,b";
$result = explode(",", $string);
echo "<pre>".print_r($result, true)."</pre>";

And the output I get back is:

Array
(
    [0] => a
    [1] => 
    [2] => b
)