Reading Text Files in PHP: Step-by-Step Guide

Many web development scenarios involve reading data from text files. In PHP, the file handling functions provide convenient methods for reading plain text files line by line. Let's break down the process of reading a text file using PHP.

Code to Read Text Files:

The following PHP code snippet demonstrates how to read a text file and process its contents line by line:

Explanation:

1. fopen(): Opens the text file specified by 'filename.txt' for reading.
2. fgets(): Continuously reads and assigns each line of the file to the $line variable. The loop continues until the end of the file is reached.
3. fclose(): Closes the file connection, releasing system resources.

Additional Notes:

• The file handling functions in PHP require the file to exist in the current directory or in a specified path.
• If the file cannot be opened for reading, the fopen() function returns FALSE, and the script will throw an error.
• You can use the file_get_contents() function to read the entire file as a single string instead of line by line.