novice for variables questions

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
For one, this should be in a model, not the controller. Controllers aren't meant to retrieve and parse files. And it looks like you're scraping a file, so the process is just inherently going to be messy and tedious (messy + tedious != controller). Once you figure out how to get it into the array structure you want, you can then have the model return this array to the controller. The controller could be responsible for passing instructions to the model function that does this (like the paths of file1 and file2, for instance)