If the file you are reading is in CSV format do not use file(), use fgetcsv(). file() will split the file by each newline that it finds, even newlines that appear within a field (i.e. within quotations).
(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
file — Reads entire file into an array
Reads an entire file into an array.
Note:
You can use file_get_contents() to return the contents of a file as a string.
filenamePath to the file.
A URL can be used as a filename with this function if the fopen wrappers have been enabled. See fopen() for more details on how to specify the filename. See the Supported Protocols and Wrappers for links to information about what abilities the various wrappers have, notes on their usage, and information on any predefined variables they may provide.
flags
The optional parameter flags can be one, or
more, of the following constants:
FILE_USE_INCLUDE_PATH
FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES
FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES
FILE_NO_DEFAULT_CONTEXT
context
Returns the file in an array. Each element of the array corresponds to a
line in the file, with the newline still attached. Upon failure,
file() returns false.
Note:
Each line in the resulting array will include the line ending, unless
FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINESis used.
Note: If PHP is not properly recognizing the line endings when reading files either on or created by a Macintosh computer, enabling the auto_detect_line_endings run-time configuration option may help resolve the problem.
As of PHP 8.3.0, throws a ValueError
if flags includes any invalid values, such
as FILE_APPEND.
Emits an E_WARNING level error if the file
does not exist.
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 8.3.0 |
ValueError is thrown for any
invalid values of flags.
|
Example #1 file() example
<?php
// Get a file into an array. In this example we'll go through HTTP to get
// the HTML source of a URL.
$lines = file('http://www.example.com/');
// Loop through our array, show HTML source as HTML source; and line numbers too.
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
echo "Line #<b>{$line_num}</b> : " . htmlspecialchars($line) . "<br />\n";
}
// Using the optional flags parameter
$trimmed = file('somefile.txt', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES);
?>When using SSL, Microsoft IIS
will violate the protocol by closing the connection without sending a
close_notify indicator. PHP will report this as "SSL: Fatal
Protocol Error" when you reach the end of the data. To work around this, the
value of error_reporting should be
lowered to a level that does not include warnings.
PHP can detect buggy IIS server software when you open
the stream using the https:// wrapper and will suppress the
warning. When using fsockopen() to create an
ssl:// socket, the developer is responsible for detecting
and suppressing this warning.
If the file you are reading is in CSV format do not use file(), use fgetcsv(). file() will split the file by each newline that it finds, even newlines that appear within a field (i.e. within quotations).To write all the lines of the file in other words to read the file line by line you can write the code like this:
<?php
$names=file('name.txt');
// To check the number of lines
echo count($names).'<br>';
foreach($names as $name)
{
echo $name.'<br>';
}
?>
this example is so basic to understand how it's working. I hope it will help many beginners.
Regards,
Bingothis may be obvious, but it took me a while to figure out what I was doing wrong. So I wanted to share. I have a file on my "c:\" drive. How do I file() it?
Don't forget the backslash is special and you have to "escape" the backslash i.e. "\\":
<?php
$lines = file("C:\\Documents and Settings\\myfile.txt");
foreach($lines as $line)
{
echo($line);
}
?>
hope this helps...read from CSV data (file) into an array with named keys
... with or without 1st row = header (keys)
(see 4th parameter of function call as true / false)
<?php
// --------------------------------------------------------------
function csv_in_array($url,$delm=";",$encl="\"",$head=false) {
$csvxrow = file($url); // ---- csv rows to array ----
$csvxrow[0] = chop($csvxrow[0]);
$csvxrow[0] = str_replace($encl,'',$csvxrow[0]);
$keydata = explode($delm,$csvxrow[0]);
$keynumb = count($keydata);
if ($head === true) {
$anzdata = count($csvxrow);
$z=0;
for($x=1; $x<$anzdata; $x++) {
$csvxrow[$x] = chop($csvxrow[$x]);
$csvxrow[$x] = str_replace($encl,'',$csvxrow[$x]);
$csv_data[$x] = explode($delm,$csvxrow[$x]);
$i=0;
foreach($keydata as $key) {
$out[$z][$key] = $csv_data[$x][$i];
$i++;
}
$z++;
}
}
else {
$i=0;
foreach($csvxrow as $item) {
$item = chop($item);
$item = str_replace($encl,'',$item);
$csv_data = explode($delm,$item);
for ($y=0; $y<$keynumb; $y++) {
$out[$i][$y] = $csv_data[$y];
}
$i++;
}
}
return $out;
}
// --------------------------------------------------------------
?>
fuction call with 4 parameters:
(1) = the file with CSV data (url / string)
(2) = colum delimiter (e.g: ; or | or , ...)
(3) = values enclosed by (e.g: ' or " or ^ or ...)
(4) = with or without 1st row = head (true/false)
<?php
// ----- call ------
$csvdata = csv_in_array( $yourcsvfile, ";", "\"", true );
// -----------------
// ----- view ------
echo "<pre>\r\n";
print_r($csvdata);
echo "</pre>\r\n";
// -----------------
?>
PS: also see: http://php.net/manual/de/function.fgetcsv.php to read CSV data into an array
... and other file-handling methods
^My experience is that the function file does uses the cached content if the file has changed....Be aware that using file() to count lines can cause OOM on the server as it'll allocate all lines into an array.
If you're dealing with files that can have thousands of lines, SplFileObject might be a better idea and with little changes you can get the same result.As of PHP 5.6 the file(), file_get_contents(), and fopen() functions will return false if you are referencing a source URL that doesn't have a valid SSL certificate. Presumably, you will run into this a lot in your development environments this will drive you crazy.
You will need to create a stream context and provide it as an argument to the various file operations to tell it to ignore invalid SSL credentials.
$args = array("ssl"=>array("verify_peer"=>false,"verify_peer_name"=>false),"http"=>array('timeout' => 60, 'user_agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/3.0.0.1'));
$context = stream_context_create($args);
$httpfile = file($url, false, $context);