Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours, Third Edition

Reading from Files

PHP provides a number of functions for reading data from files. These enable you to read by the byte, the line, or even the character.

Reading Lines from a File with fgets() and feof()

After you have opened a file for reading, you often need to access it line by line. To read a line from an open file, you can use fgets(), which requires the file resource returned from fopen() as an argument. You must also pass it an integer as a second argument. This specifies the number of bytes the function should read if it doesn’t first encounter a line end or the end of the file. The fgets() function reads the file until it reaches a newline character ("\n"), the number of bytes specified in the length argument, or the end of the file: ...