File Read

This section contains the detail about reading file in PHP.

File Read

In the above sections, we have discussed about how to create, open, close & write to a file. In the below section, you will learn how to read a file.

To read a file, we have three main functions or methods- fread, fgets & fgetc.

Reading a file till specified character

For this purpose, we have fread() function. The fread() function takes two arguments - first the file handle & other is an integer to tell the function how much data, in bytes, it is supposed to read.

The Data inside testFile.txt is given below :

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Given below example read first 7 characters from the file :

<?php
// PHP code to read a file
$myFileName = 'C:\testFile.txt';
$myFileHandle = fopen($myFileName, 'r') or die("cant open file");
$dataRead = fread($myFileHandle, 7);
fclose($myFileHandle);
echo $dataRead;
?>

Output

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Read whole file using fread()

Given below example :

<?php
// PHP code to read a file
$myFileName = 'C:\testFile.txt';
$myFileHandle = fopen($myFileName, 'r') or die("cant open file");
$dataRead = fread($myFileHandle,filesize($myFileName));
fclose($myFileHandle);
echo $dataRead;
?>

Output :

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Reading a File Line by Line

You can make you code to read a file line by line using fgets() as follows:

<?php
$myFileName = 'C:\testFile.txt';
$myFileHandle = fopen($myFileName, 'r') or die("cant open file");
//Output a line until the end of file
while(!feof($myFileHandle))
{
echo fgets($myFileHandle). "<br />";
}
fclose($myFileHandle);
?> 

Output :

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Reading a File Character by Character

You can make your code to read a file line by line using fgetc() as follows :

<?php
$myFileName = 'C:\testFile.txt';
$myFileHandle = fopen($myFileName, 'r') or die("cant open file");
while (!feof($myFileHandle))
{
echo fgetc($myFileHandle);
}
fclose($myFileHandle);
?> 

Output :

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