Filtering CSV in PHP

I got an email from a KQED reporter asking about this old post on importing CSVs into Google Sheets. The source data was big though and hosted on GitHub and they only wanted the California data.

I thought that anything we did in Google Script was likely to time out so I built a little PHP filter.

//I commented these out so I could more easily see the data at the URL
//header("Content-Type: text/csv"); 
//header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=CA-data.csv");

$csvFile  = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/master/us-counties-2022.csv';//original file source

readCSV($csvFile,$state);

function readCSV($csvFile,$state){
    $file_handle = fopen($csvFile,'r');//get that file
    $i = 0;
    while (!feof($file_handle)) {
        $line = fgetcsv($file_handle, 1024,';');
       
        $row = explode(',', $line[0]);//turn the csv line into an array so we can check for the state more easily- the state is the 2nd object in the array (remember counting starts at 0 here)
        if($row[2] === 'California' || $i === 0){//is the state California or is it the first row? if so . . . 
        	echo $line[0] . PHP_EOL; //spit out the data and add the PHP end of line
        	$i = $i+1;
        }
 
    }
    fclose($file_handle);        
}

Now instead of importing the main CSV URL in GitHub, we’ll do the import on my filter URL at https://tomwoodward.us/csv-filter.php. Seems to work nicely and you can set the trigger to re-import every day at whatever time you want.