Last updated: Fri, 01 Jun 2007

file

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

file — Reads entire file into an array

Description

array file ( string $filename [, int $flags [, resource $context]] )

Similiar to file_get_contents(), except that file() returns the file in an array. Each element of the array corresponds to a line in the file, with the newline still attached. Upon failure, file() returns FALSE.

The optional parameter flags can be one, or more, of the following constants:

FILE_USE_INCLUDE_PATH: Search for the file in the include_path.
FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES: Do not add newline at the end of each array element
FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES: Skip empty lines

Note: Prior to PHP 5.0.0 the flags parameter only covered include_path and was enabled with 1.


<?php

// Get a file into an array.  In this example we'll go through HTTP to get

// the HTML source of a URL.

$lines = file('http://www.example.com/');



// Loop through our array, show HTML source as HTML source; and line numbers too.

foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {

    echo "Line #<b>{$line_num}</b> : " . htmlspecialchars($line) . "<br />\n";

}



// Another example, let's get a web page into a string.  See also file_get_contents().

$html = implode('', file('http://www.example.com/'));

?>

Tip

You can use a URL as a filename with this function if the fopen wrappers have been enabled. See fopen() for more details on how to specify the filename and Appendix O, List of Supported Protocols/Wrappers for a list of supported URL protocols.

Note: Each line in the resulting array will include the line ending, unless FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES is used, so you still need to use rtrim() if you do not want the line ending present.

Note: If you are having problems with PHP not recognizing the line endings when reading files either on or created by a Macintosh computer, you might want to enable the auto_detect_line_endings run-time configuration option.

Note: As of PHP 4.3.0 you can use file_get_contents() to return the contents of a file as a string.
In PHP 4.3.0 file() became binary safe.

Note: Context support was added with PHP 5.0.0. For a description of contexts, refer to Streams.

Warning

When using SSL, Microsoft IIS will violate the protocol by closing the connection without sending a close_notify indicator. PHP will report this as "SSL: Fatal Protocol Error" when you reach the end of the data. To workaround this, you should lower your error_reporting level not to include warnings. PHP 4.3.7 and higher can detect buggy IIS server software when you open the stream using the https:// wrapper and will suppress the warning for you. If you are using fsockopen() to create an ssl:// socket, you are responsible for detecting and suppressing the warning yourself.

add a note User Contributed Notes
file

info at carstanje dot com
28-Nov-2006 08:33


Using file() for reading large text files > 10 Mb gives problems, therefore you should use this instead. It is much slower but it works fine. $lines will return an array with all the lines.



$handle = @fopen('yourfile...', "r");

if ($handle) {

   while (!feof($handle)) {

       $lines[] = fgets($handle, 4096);

   }

   fclose($handle);

}

ae at instinctive dot de
23-Nov-2006 06:25


The Changelog for PHP5 states that there is an optional parameter that instructs file() to cut off lineendings by itself, however, on this page, there is no mention of such a parameter:



Added optional parameter to file() which makes the result array not contain the line endings and to skip empty lines. (Ilia)

richardtcunningham at gmail dot com
11-Jul-2006 09:19


justin at visunet dot ie's note of 20-Mar-2003 states

"Note: Now that file() is binary safe it is 'much' slower than it used to be. If you are planning to read large files it may be worth your while using fgets() instead of file()."



I tested fgets(), file_get_contents(), and file() on PHP 4.3.2 and PHP 5 and timed each to be under a second with over 200,000 lines. I do not know if he was testing extremely long lines or what, but I could not duplicate the difference that he mentioned.

jonathan dot gotti at free dot fr
01-Feb-2006 10:52


you can use 

$file = array_map('rtrim',file('myfile.txt'));

to remove annoying ending lines of the resulting array.

Nuts
18-Jan-2006 11:16


WARNING ON WINDOWS:

file() function will add "\r\n" in to the end of the row, even if you use only "\n" char to make rows in the file!



On UNIX systems there is no such problem.

redzia
08-Feb-2005 03:55


Example usage of file to remove line containing a key string

<?



$key = "w3ty8l";



//load file into $fc array



$fc=file("some.txt");



//open same file and use "w" to clear file 



$f=fopen("some.txt","w");



//loop through array using foreach



foreach($fc as $line)

{

      if (!strstr($line,$key)) //look for $key in each line

            fputs($f,$line); //place $line back in file 

}

fclose($f);



?>

andyg at stingrayboats dot com
21-Jul-2004 08:27


i tried for quite sometime to get my pdf to attach right some of you may want to try reading it as binary first then base 64 it.



//this did not work for me with a pdf file it came in garbled

$data = chunk_split(base64_encode(implode("", file($filelocation))));

//but tis seemed to make it work correctly

$data = fread($file,filesize($filelocation));

    fclose($file);

    $data = chunk_split(base64_encode($data));

kangaroo232002 at yahoo dot co dot uk
18-Jun-2004 12:03


Instead of using file() for parsing ini / conf files, as shown in mvanbeek at supporting-role dot co dot uk's example below (above?), a great function that puts all your conf info into an associative array is parse_ini_file($filename); very useful !



ian.

J at TIPPELL dot com
12-Jun-2004 02:18


heres a little script to return a random quote from a quotes file.



<?php

$textfile = "Includes/Quotes.txt";      //quotes file

if ($quotes = @file("$textfile")) {     //don't display errors on file open

   $quote = rand(0, sizeof($quotes)-1);

   echo $quotes[$quote];                //echo a random quote

}else{

   echo ("default quote");           //if quotes file wasn't found, echo out a default quote

}

?>

skipjack at skipjack dot info
12-Feb-2004 10:45


this a little function I wrote that checks if two ascii files are the same. 

it opens the file then removes the spaces then coverts the crc32 to base 10 and compares the results. 

function fcheck($tool)

{    if(fopen("file.01", "r") != FALSE){

    $fp1 = 'file.02';

    $fp = 'semcond.01';



    $data = implode(" ", file($fp));

    $data1 = implode(" ", file($fp1));

    $test1 = (dechex(crc32($data)));

    $test2 = (dechex(crc32($data1)));

      if($test1 == $test2)

          $sfv_checksum = 'TRUE';

           else

              $sfv_checksum = 'FALSE';

          return $sfv_checksum;

   }



}

mvanbeek at supporting-role dot co dot uk
31-Dec-2003 05:39


I needed a cross platform config file for a project using both perl and php, so I used the perl script in the Perl Cookbook, and wrote the following PHP script. This going in an include file that all the PHP files reference, so the only thing that needs to be do for set up, is to set the location of the config file.



$filename = "/opt/ssis/includes/ssis-config";

$config = file($filename);

reset ($config);

foreach ($config as $line)

     {

     if ( $line == "" ) next($config);           # Ignore blankline

     elseif ( $line == "\n" ) next($config);      # Ignore newline

     elseif ( strstr($line,"#")) next($config); # Ignore comments

     else

          {

          $line = rtrim($line);  # Get rid of newline characters

          $line = ltrim($line);  # Get rid of any leading spaces

          $value = preg_split("/\s*=\s*/", $line, 2); # split by "=" and removing blank space either side of it.

          ${Settings}["$value[0]"] = $value[1]; # Create a new array with all the values.

          }

     }



I am sure there is a neater way of doing it, but all the Config libaries floating arround seemed very complicated. All the config file needs is a series of lines ( key = value ) in plain text.

global-thenumberafterzero at nospam dot web dot de
31-Oct-2003 03:21


If you want a more powerful tool to open files you may want to use the curllib functions. If curllib is installed on your Server it is probably the best (but not fastest) tool for opening files. More information you can find here:



http://curl.haxx.se

or on php.net:

http://de.php.net/manual/de/ref.curl.php

dir @ badblue com
12-Sep-2003 09:48


Jeff's array2file function is a good start; here are a couple of improvements (no possibility of handle leak when fwrite fails, additional capability of both string2file and array2file; presumably faster performance through use of implode).



function String2File($sIn, $sFileOut) {

  $rc = false;

  do {

    if (!($f = fopen($sFileOut, "wa+"))) {

      $rc = 1; break;

    }

    if (!fwrite($f, $sIn)) {

      $rc = 2; break;

    }

    $rc = true;

  } while (0);

  if ($f) {

    fclose($f);

  }

  return ($rc);

}



function Array2File($aIn, $sFileOut) {

  return (String2File(implode("\n", $aIn), $sFileOut));

}



If you're generating your string text using a GET or POST from a TEXTAREA (e.g., a mini-web-text-editor), remember that strip_slashes and str_replace of "/r/n" to "/n" may be necessary as well using these functions.



HTH --dir @ badblue com

hhw
23-Aug-2003 03:43


The following function can handle text files whose line endings are whatever <LF> (*nix), <CR><LF> (M$) or <CR> (Mac)



function file2($filename) {

        $fp = fopen($filename, "rb");

        $buffer = fread($fp, filesize($filename));

        fclose($fp);

        $lines = preg_split("/\r?\n|\r/", $buffer);

        return $lines;

}

John
20-Jul-2003 11:32


after many months of confusion and frustration, i have finally figured out something that i should have noticed the first time around.



you can't file("test.txt") when that same file has been flocked. i guess i didn't have a full understanding of what i was doing when i used flock(). all i had to do was move the flock() around, and all was well.

webmaster AT the-afterburner DOT de
25-Mar-2003 12:35


If you want to send a URL via GET to a script and want to open this URL via file() there are problems if there is a & sign in the URL, all after die & sign is cut.



TO fix this an get it working with the & sign in the URL



@$myopenedcontent= implode("", file ("$url"));

$myopenedcontent=eregi_replace('&','{KU}',$myopenedcontent);



so all & signs are replaced by {KU}



before use the file() function you have to rereplace it, the whole code:



$url=eregi_replace('{KU}','&,$url);

@$myopenedcontent= implode("", file ("$url"));

$myopenedcontent=eregi_replace('&','{KU}',$myopenedcontent);

echo "$myopenedcontent";



hope it is helpful ;)



Bye

Afterburner

justin at visunet dot ie
20-Mar-2003 05:36


Note: Now that file() is binary safe it is 'much' slower than it used to be. If you are planning to read large files it may be worth your while using fgets() instead of file() For example:



$fd = fopen ("log_file.txt", "r");

while (!feof ($fd)) 

{

   $buffer = fgets($fd, 4096);

   $lines[] = $buffer;

}

fclose ($fd);



The resulting array is $lines.



I did a test on a 200,000 line file. It took seconds with fgets()  compared to minutes with file().

03-Mar-2003 10:16


You can use file with https if you go to:



http://ftp.proventum.net/pub/php/win32/misc/openssl/. 



This is instead of using the php_openssl.dll, so be sure to comment this extension in your php.ini.

akaylaa at yahoo dot com
06-Dec-2002 07:01


a quick way to count the number of lines in a file is



 $lines = file ('filename');

 $num_lines = count ($lines);



echo ("Total lines in file: " . $num_lines);

e dot maccarthy at csuohio dot edu
02-Jun-2002 10:04


[[Editors note: using fopen/fgets instead of file() would be more efficient for this task as there is no need to load the entire file into memory]]





Here is a quick snippet that will read in N number of lines of a file, then print them.





$n=10


$fp = file('/path/to/your/file');


$i=0


while($i < $n){


            echo "$fp[$i]";


            $i++;


}





I am using this right now to display the current progress of the seti@home client working on my server, instead of displaying the whole thing, which isn't web page friendly.


Because sometimes short really is sweet...

andrea at brancatelli dot it
16-Mar-2002 07:16


file() has a strange behaviour when reading file with both \n and \r as line delimitator (DOS files), since it will return an array with every single line but with just a \n in the end. It seems like \r just disappears.



This is happening with PHP 4.0.4 for OS/2. Don't know about the Windows version.

php@don't_spam_me
09-Feb-2002 08:56


It appears that the file() function causes file access problems for perl cgi scripts accessing the same files.  I am using Perl v5.6.0 in linux with PHP/4.0.4pl1.  After running a php app using the file() function, any perl cgi trying to access the same file randomly dies returning an internal server error: premature end of script headers.



The simple fix is to use fopen(), fgets() and fclose() instead of file().

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Last updated: Fri, 01 Jun 2007