load data from CSV server side

Hello all,

I could not find the answer to this question yet, so I tried creating it myself.
Although I'm slowly progressing toward a working goal, I feel like I'm re-inventing the wheel every line of code I write ...

So, in short:
would someone has a working code of datatable that reads data from a (rather large) CSV file on server side ? (rather large is 14.000 lines => my browser can't handle that much in DOM - the server can quite easily handle a parsing of that file every so often).

what I want:
using the basic zero-config example:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').dataTable( {
        "bProcessing": true,
        "bServerSide": true,
        "sAjaxSource": "read_csv.php"
    } );
} );
</SCRIPT>

From there, I would need a working "read_csv.php" that obviously outputs a JSON format.
WARNING: I'm still new to datatables, so maybe I've got it all wrong, so let me know in that case ;)



note:
just to show I was not lazy and did the start of my homework: I've already got the basics working with the below content of read_csv.php, but as I was saying, I feel like re-doing stuff that has probably been done countless of times ... and doing it in a not-so-good way:

<?
        /*
         * Paging
         */
        $iDisplayStart = 0;
        $iDisplayLength = 9;
        if ( isset( $_GET['iDisplayStart'] ) && $_GET['iDisplayLength'] != '-1' ) {
                $iDisplayStart = $_GET['iDisplayStart'];
                $iDisplayLength = $_GET['iDisplayLength'];
        }
        $iDisplayEnd = $iDisplayStart + $iDisplayLength;
        $myFile = "/prod/backup/OSS/NE_DATA/NE_DATA.csv";
        $myFile_data = file($myFile);
        $count = 0;
        $echo_block = "";
        foreach ($myFile_data as &$line) {
                $line = chop($line);
                $line = addslashes($line);
                list($VENDOR,$EM,$NETWORK,$NE_NAME,$TYPE,$VERSION,$MAA,$MAC,$NSEL,$ON_IDN,$COMMENTS,$EM_IP,$NE_IP,$GNE,$HD1,$HD2,$Region,$Country) = explode(",",$line);
                $echo_line = "[ \"$VENDOR\", \"$EM\", \"$NETWORK\", \"$NE_NAME\", \"$TYPE\", \"$VERSION\", \"$MAA\", \"$MAC\", \"$NSEL\", \"$ON_IDN\", \"$COMMENTS\", \"$EM_IP\", \"$NE_IP\", \"$GNE\", \"$HD1\", \"$HD2\", \"$Region\", \"$Country\" ],";
                $count++;
                if ( $count > $iDisplayStart && $count < $iDisplayEnd ) {
                        $echo_block .= $echo_line;
                }
        }
        $echo_block = substr_replace($echo_block,"",-1);


# add the header:
        $echo_block = "{
        \"sEcho\": ".$_GET['sEcho'].",
        \"iTotalRecords\": \"14535\",
        \"iTotalDisplayRecords\": \"14535\",
        \"aaData\": [
        ".$echo_block;


        echo "$echo_block ] }";
?>

so i've got the paging done, and the real stuff will only start with filtering and ordering...