PHP Cookbook

18.6. Counting Lines, Paragraphs, or Records in a File

Problem

You want to count the number of lines, paragraphs, or records in a file.

Solution

To count lines, use fgets( ) . Because it reads a line at a time, you can count the number of times it’s called before reaching the end of a file:

$lines = 0;

if ($fh = fopen('orders.txt','r')) {
  while (! feof($fh)) {
    if (fgets($fh,1048576)) {
      $lines++;
    }
  }
}
print $lines;

To count paragraphs, increment the counter only when you read a blank line:

$paragraphs = 0;

if ($fh = fopen('great-american-novel.txt','r')) {
  while (! feof($fh)) {
    $s = fgets($fh,1048576);
    if (("\n" == $s) || ("\r\n" == $s)) {
      $paragraphs++;
    }
  }
}
print $paragraphs;

To count records, increment the counter only when the line read contains just the record separator and whitespace:

$records = 0;
$record_separator = '--end--';

if ($fh = fopen('great-american-novel.txt','r')) {
  while (! feof($fh)) {
    $s = rtrim(fgets($fh,1048576));
    if ($s == $record_separator) {
      $records++;
    }
  }
}
print $records;

Discussion

In the line counter, $lines is incremented only if fgets( ) returns a true value. As fgets( ) moves through the file, it returns each line it retrieves. When it reaches the last line, it returns false, so $lines doesn’t get incorrectly incremented. Because EOF has been reached on the file, feof( ) returns true, and the while loop ends.

This paragraph counter works fine on simple text but may produce unexpected results when presented with a long string of blank lines or a file ...