PHP File Reading Methods

In PHP there are many ways to read a file. There is a traditional file handling to read/write a file and various different methods to get the file content.
In this article, we will explain the functionality and output of different methods used to read the file.

PHP File Handling Methods :

In file handling, first we need to open the file with fopen() method that we want o read. Methods to get the file content :

fgets() : fgets() method read the file line by line. we use feof command to detect the end of the file and read the file line by line.

fread() : fread() method is used when we want to read the file in limited size. We pass the limit in bytes in fread() method, and the method then reads the file to that limit and leave the remaining part of the file.

fgetss() : fgetss() method can read the HTML content in a file and will give the simple text as an output.

demo.txt

The three of the methods will give the same output as shown below :

Methods Other Than The PHP File Handling

There are various methods other than the traditional PHP file handling that we can use for different requirements.

file_get_contents() : We do not need to open or close a file to read. It returns the file in a string, starting at the specified offset to maxlen bytes. On failure, file_get_contents() will return false. With this method, we can read the file located on the other server by giving the path to the server.

readfile() : The method reads a file and writes it to the output buffer. It returns the number of bytes read from the file. If an error occurs, false is returned and unless the function was called as @readfile(), an error message is printed. In PHP @ is used to ignore the warnings, so that we can proceed further.

When we try to open the wrong file with readfile().