on file() and flock()
My supervisor came up with a brilliant plan to workaround the inability of the file() to work on a flock()'ed file.
We created a dummy file called lockfile.txt. We would flock() lockfile.txt. Once we had a lock on it, we used file() on the file we wanted to read, then altered the file and called fclose on both files.
file
(PHP 4, PHP 5)
file — Reads entire file into an array
Description
Reads an entire file into an array.
Note: You can use file_get_contents() to return the contents of a file as a string.
Parameters
- filename
-
Path to the file.
TipDu kan använda en URL som filnamn till den här funktionen om direktivet fopen wrappers är påslaget. Se fopen() för fler detaljer kring hur du specificerar filnamnet och för en List of Supported Protocols/Wrapperslista över stödda URL-protkoll.
- flags
-
The optional parameter flags can be one, or more, of the following constants:
- FILE_USE_INCLUDE_PATH
- Search for the file in the include_path.
- FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES
- Do not add newline at the end of each array element
- FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES
- Skip empty lines
- FILE_TEXT
- The content is returned in UTF-8 encoding. You can specify a different encoding by creating a custom context. This flag cannot be used with FILE_BINARY. This flag is only available since PHP 6.
- FILE_BINARY
- The content is read as binary data. This is the default setting and cannot be used with FILE_TEXT. This flag is only available since PHP 6.
- context
-
A context resource created with the stream_context_create() function.
Note: Context support was added with PHP 5.0.0. For a description of contexts, refer to Streams.
Return Values
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_LINES is used, so you still need to use rtrim() if you do not want the line ending present.
Note: Om du har problem med att PHP inte känner igen radslut vid hantering av filer på en Macintosh (antingen om de är skrivna på en Mac eller skapade på en) kan det vara idé att slå på direktivet auto_detect_line_endings i din konfigurationsfil.
ChangeLog
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 6.0.0 | Added support for the FILE_TEXT and FILE_BINARY flags. |
| 5.0.0 | The context parameter was added |
| 5.0.0 | Prior to PHP 5.0.0 the flags parameter only covered include_path and was enabled with 1 |
| 4.3.0 | file() became binary safe |
Exempel
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";
}
// Another example, let's get a web page into a string. See also file_get_contents().
$html = implode('', file('http://www.example.com/'));
?>
Notes
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 workaround this, you should lower your error_reporting level not to include warnings. PHP 4.3.7 and higher can detect buggy IIS server software when you open the stream using the https:// wrapper and will suppress the warning for you. If you are using fsockopen() to create an ssl:// socket, you are responsible for detecting and suppressing the warning yourself.
file
21-Apr-2008 10:49
16-Apr-2008 08:03
A user suggested using rtrim always, due to the line ending conflict with files that have an EOL that differs from the server EOL.
Using rtrim with it's default character replacement is a bad solution though, as it removes all whitespace in addition to the '\r' and '\n' characters.
A good solution using rtrim follows:
<?php
$line = rtrim($line, "\r\n") . PHP_EOL;
?>
This removes only EOL characters, and replaces with the server's EOL character, thus making preg_* work fine when matching the EOL ($)
05-Apr-2008 10:45
althought it's mentioned twice in the description, it took me a whole night to figure out why i got new-lines in my array.
hence you have to put a flag on it FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES.
I mention, just you wouldn't miss this little anoying thing.
*you can use trim, but it's slighty different.
16-Feb-2008 09:15
If you're getting "failed to open stream: Permission denied" when trying to use either file() or fopen() to access files on another server. Check your host doesn't have any firewall restrictions in-place which prevent outbound connections. This is the case with my host Aplus.net
12-Jul-2007 09:25
This note applies to PHP 5.1.6 under Windows (although may apply to other versions).
It appears that the 'FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES' flag doesn't remove newlines properly when reading Windows-style text files, i.e. files whose lines end in '\r\n'.
Solution: Always use 'rtrim()' in preference to 'FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES'.
28-Nov-2006 08:33
Using file() for reading large text files > 10 Mb gives problems, therefore you should use this instead. It is much slower but it works fine. $lines will return an array with all the lines.
<?php
$handle = @fopen('yourfile...', "r");
if ($handle) {
while (!feof($handle)) {
$lines[] = fgets($handle, 4096);
}
fclose($handle);
}
?>
11-Jul-2006 09:19
justin at visunet dot ie's note of 20-Mar-2003 states
"Note: Now that file() is binary safe it is 'much' slower than it used to be. If you are planning to read large files it may be worth your while using fgets() instead of file()."
I tested fgets(), file_get_contents(), and file() on PHP 4.3.2 and PHP 5 and timed each to be under a second with over 200,000 lines. I do not know if he was testing extremely long lines or what, but I could not duplicate the difference that he mentioned.
01-Feb-2006 10:52
you can use
$file = array_map('rtrim',file('myfile.txt'));
to remove annoying ending lines of the resulting array.
18-Jan-2006 11:16
WARNING ON WINDOWS:
file() function will add "\r\n" in to the end of the row, even if you use only "\n" char to make rows in the file!
On UNIX systems there is no such problem.
12-Sep-2003 09:48
Jeff's array2file function is a good start; here are a couple of improvements (no possibility of handle leak when fwrite fails, additional capability of both string2file and array2file; presumably faster performance through use of implode).
<?php
function String2File($sIn, $sFileOut) {
$rc = false;
do {
if (!($f = fopen($sFileOut, "wa+"))) {
$rc = 1; break;
}
if (!fwrite($f, $sIn)) {
$rc = 2; break;
}
$rc = true;
} while (0);
if ($f) {
fclose($f);
}
return ($rc);
}
function Array2File($aIn, $sFileOut) {
return (String2File(implode("\n", $aIn), $sFileOut));
}
?>
If you're generating your string text using a GET or POST from a TEXTAREA (e.g., a mini-web-text-editor), remember that strip_slashes and str_replace of "/r/n" to "/n" may be necessary as well using these functions.
HTH --dir @ badblue com
20-Jul-2003 11:32
after many months of confusion and frustration, i have finally figured out something that i should have noticed the first time around.
you can't file("test.txt") when that same file has been flocked. i guess i didn't have a full understanding of what i was doing when i used flock(). all i had to do was move the flock() around, and all was well.
20-Mar-2003 05:36
Note: Now that file() is binary safe it is 'much' slower than it used to be. If you are planning to read large files it may be worth your while using fgets() instead of file() For example:
<?php
$fd = fopen ("log_file.txt", "r");
while (!feof ($fd))
{
$buffer = fgets($fd, 4096);
$lines[] = $buffer;
}
fclose ($fd);
?>
The resulting array is $lines.
I did a test on a 200,000 line file. It took seconds with fgets() compared to minutes with file().
16-Mar-2002 07:16
file() has a strange behaviour when reading file with both \n and \r as line delimitator (DOS files), since it will return an array with every single line but with just a \n in the end. It seems like \r just disappears.
This is happening with PHP 4.0.4 for OS/2. Don't know about the Windows version.
09-Feb-2002 08:56
It appears that the file() function causes file access problems for perl cgi scripts accessing the same files. I am using Perl v5.6.0 in linux with PHP/4.0.4pl1. After running a php app using the file() function, any perl cgi trying to access the same file randomly dies returning an internal server error: premature end of script headers.
The simple fix is to use fopen(), fgets() and fclose() instead of file().
