Read a plain text file with php

Question

<?php

$fh = fopen('filename.txt','r');
while ($line = fgets($fh)) {
  // <... Do your work with the line ...>
  // echo($line);
}
fclose($fh);
?>

This will give you a line by line read.. read the notes at php.net/fgets regarding the end of line issues with Macs.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php
http://php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php

$array = explode("\n", file_get_contents($filename));

This wont actually read it line by line, but it will get you an array which can be used line by line. There are a number of alternatives.

You can also produce array by using file:

$array = file('/path/to/text.txt');

$filename = "fille.txt";
$fp = fopen($filename, "r");

$content = fread($fp, filesize($filename));
$lines = explode("\n", $content);
fclose($fp);
print_r($lines);

In this code full content of the file is copied to the variable $content and then split it into an array with each newline character in the file.

W3Schools is your friend: http://www.w3schools.com/php/func_filesystem_fgets.asp

And here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php has more info on fopen including what the modes are.

What W3Schools says:

<?php
$file = fopen("test.txt","r");

while(! feof($file))
  {
  echo fgets($file). "<br />";
  }

fclose($file);
?> 

fopen opens the file (in this case test.txt with mode 'r' which means read-only and places the pointer at the beginning of the file)

The while loop tests to check if it's at the end of file (feof) and while it isn't it calls fgets which gets the current line where the pointer is.

Continues doing this until it is the end of file, and then closes the file.