Read a file from line X to line Y? [duplicate]

Question

The closest I've seen in the PHP docs, is to fread() a given length, but that doesnt specify which line to start from. Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, in order to be able to read from line x to line y, you'd need to be able to detect line breaks... and you'd have to scan through the whole file. However, assuming you're not asking about this for performance reasons, you can get lines x to y with the following:

$x = 10; //inclusive start line
$y = 20; //inclusive end line
$lines = file('myfile.txt');
$my_important_lines = array_slice($lines, $x, $y);

See: array_slice

Answer 2

Yes, you can do that easily with SplFileObject::seek

$file = new SplFileObject('filename.txt');
$file->seek(1000);
for($i = 0; !$file->eof() && $i < 1000; $i++) {
    echo $file->current(); 
    $file->next();
}

This is a method from the SeekableIterator interface and not to be confused with fseek.

And because SplFileObject is iterable you can do it even easier with a LimitIterator:

$file = new SplFileObject('longFile.txt');
$fileIterator = new LimitIterator($file, 1000, 2000);
foreach($fileIterator as $line) {
    echo $line, PHP_EOL;
}

Again, this is zero-based, so it's line 1001 to 2001.

Answer 3

You not going to be able to read starting from line X because lines can be of arbitrary length. So you will have to read from the start counting the number of lines read to get to line X. For example:

<?php
$f = fopen('sample.txt', 'r');
$lineNo = 0;
$startLine = 3;
$endLine = 6;
while ($line = fgets($f)) {
    $lineNo++;
    if ($lineNo >= $startLine) {
        echo $line;
    }
    if ($lineNo == $endLine) {
        break;
    }
}
fclose($f);