I used fgetcsv to read pipe-delimited data files, and ran into the following quirk.
The data file contained data similar to this:
RECNUM|TEXT|COMMENT
1|hi!|some comment
2|"error!|another comment
3|where does this go?|yet another comment
4|the end!"|last comment
I read the file like this:
<?php
$row = fgetcsv( $fi, $length, '|' );
?>
This causes a problem on record 2: the quote immediately after the pipe causes the file to be read up to the following quote --in this case, in record 4. Everything in between was stored in a single element of $row.
In this particular case it is easy to spot, but my script was processing thousands of records and it took me some time to figure out what went wrong.
The annoying thing is, that there doesn't seem to be an elegant fix. You can't tell PHP not to use an enclosure --for example, like this:
<?php
$row = fgetcsv( $fi, $length, '|', '' );
?>
(Well, you can tell PHP that, but it doesn't work.)
So you'd have to resort to a solution where you use an extremely unlikely enclosure, but since the enclosure can only be one character long, it may be hard to find.
Alternatively (and IMNSHO: more elegantly), you can choose to read these files like this, instead:
<?php
$line = fgets( $fi, $length );
$row = explode( '|', $line );
?>
As it's more intuitive and resilient, I've decided to favor this 'construct' over fgetcsv from now on.