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Today I was working with some CSV files using PHP’s fgetcsv and array_search functions.

I had a row like this:

cus_no,first_name,last_name,full_name,fax_no,phone_no,e_mail

Looks normal, right?

But when I was running array_search('cus_no', $headerRow) it would return FALSE. What is the deal?

Digging deeper, print_r() returned exactly what expected:

Array
(
    [0] => cus_no
    [1] => first_name
    [2] => last_name
    [3] => full_name
    [4] => fax_no
    [5] => phone_no
    [6] => e_mail
)

Okay. Scratch head. Sip coffee. Deep breath. What is going on here?!

Lets see what var_dump() says:

array(7) {
  [0]=>
  string(12) "cus_no"
  [1]=>
  string(21) "first_name"
  [2]=>
  string(19) "last_name"
  [3]=>
  string(19) "full_name"
  [4]=>
  string(13) "fax_no"
  [5]=>
  string(17) "phone_no"
  [6]=>
" string(15) "e_mail
}

Whoa. That is strange. Why is that quote at the beginning of the line? Check eyes. Sip coffee.

var_export() had something much different to report:

array (
  0 => 'c' . "\0" . 'u' . "\0" . 's' . "\0" . '_' . "\0" . 'n' . "\0" . 'o' . "\0" . '',
  1 => '' . "\0" . 'f' . "\0" . 'i' . "\0" . 'r' . "\0" . 's' . "\0" . 't' . "\0" . '_' . "\0" . 'n' . "\0" . 'a' . "\0" . 'm' . "\0" . 'e' . "\0" . '',
  2 => '' . "\0" . 'l' . "\0" . 'a' . "\0" . 's' . "\0" . 't' . "\0" . '_' . "\0" . 'n' . "\0" . 'a' . "\0" . 'm' . "\0" . 'e' . "\0" . '',
  3 => '' . "\0" . 'f' . "\0" . 'u' . "\0" . 'l' . "\0" . 'l' . "\0" . '_' . "\0" . 'n' . "\0" . 'a' . "\0" . 'm' . "\0" . 'e' . "\0" . '',
  4 => '' . "\0" . 'f' . "\0" . 'a' . "\0" . 'x' . "\0" . '_' . "\0" . 'n' . "\0" . 'o' . "\0" . '',
  5 => '' . "\0" . 'p' . "\0" . 'h' . "\0" . 'o' . "\0" . 'n' . "\0" . 'e' . "\0" . '_' . "\0" . 'n' . "\0" . 'o' . "\0" . '',
' . "\0" . '',0" . 'e' . "\0" . '_' . "\0" . 'm' . "\0" . 'a' . "\0" . 'i' . "\0" . 'l' . "\0" . '
)

Whoa! Now that is strange. Looks like there are two characters per… wait a sec!

Should have known. UTF-16. Friends don’t let friends use non-multibyte functions on multibyte datas! It was putting null characters into the string internally? Who knows. I’m sure the PHP source code would probably enlighten me on this. But no time! Those CSV files aren’t going to read themselves!

Update:
My fellow llama Jonathan Hodges noticed something I failed to see: The length of the strings in var_dump() are double the size they should be:

array(7) {
  [0]=>
  string(*12*) "cus_no"
  ...

Man, talk about a frustrating problem! I kept getting this errors while calling pdftk (from the mac installer, which the version as of this writing is 1.12):

Unhandled Java Exception: java.io.CharConversionException <<No stacktrace available>>

Anyway, after much hair pulling, the answer was found! Before calling shell_exec (or whatever function you use to call pdftk) you need to unset the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

# unset this so pdftk will work!
putenv(‘DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH’);

1. put the output in a variable

$pdf_data = shell_exec(’/usr/local/bin/pdftk ‘. $file_name .’ fill_form ‘.
$fdf_fn. ‘ output – flatten’);