php file

File handling is an important part of any web application. You

often need to open and process a file for different tasks.

PHP Manipulating Files

PHP has several functions for creating, reading, uploading, and editing files.

Be careful when manipulating files!

You can do a

lot of damage if you do something wrong. Common errors are: editing the wrong

file, filling a hard-drive with garbage data, and deleting the content of a file

by accident.

PHP readfile() Function

The readfile() function reads a file and writes it to the output buffer.

Assume we have a text file called "webdictionary.txt", stored on the

server, that looks like this:

AJAX = Asynchronous JavaScript and XMLCSS = Cascading Style Sheets

HTML = Hyper Text Markup LanguagePHP = PHP Hypertext PreprocessorSQL = Structured Query LanguageSVG = Scalable Vector GraphicsXML = EXtensible Markup Language

The PHP code to read the file and write it to the output buffer is as follows

(the readfile() function returns the number of bytes read on success):

Example

<?phpecho readfile("webdictionary.txt");?>

The readfile() function is useful if all you want to do is open up a file and read its contents.

The next chapters will teach you more about file handling.

PHP Exercises

Test Yourself With Exercises

Exercise:

Assume we have a file named "webdict.txt", write the correct syntax to open and read the file content.

echo ;