PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

Reading from a File
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This line reads the entire file into the array called $filearray. Each line of the file is
stored in a separate element of the array. Note that this function was not binary safe in
older versions of PHP.
The fourth option is to use the file_get_contents() function.This function is
identical to readfile() except that it returns the content of the file as a string instead
of outputting it to the browser.
Reading a Character: fgetc()
Another option for file processing is to read a single character at a time from a file.You
can do this by using the fgetc() function. It takes a file pointer as its only parameter
and returns the next character in the file.You can replace the while loop in the original
script with one that uses fgetc(), as follows:
while (!feof($fp)){
$char = fgetc($fp);
if (!feof($fp))
echo ($char==”\n” ? "": $char);
}
}
This code reads a single character at a time from the file using fgetc() and stores it in
$char, until the end of the file is reached. It then does a little processing to replace the
text end-of-line characters (\n) with HTML line breaks ().
This is just to clean up the formatting. If you try to output the file with newlines
between records, the whole file will be printed on a single line. (Try it and see.) Web
browsers do not render whitespace, such as newlines, so you need to replace them with
HTML linebreaks () instead.You can use the ternary operator to do this neatly.
A minor side effect of using fgetc() instead of fgets() is that fgetc() returns the
EOF character, whereas fgets() does not.You need to test feof() again after you’ve read
the character because you don’t want to echo the EOF to the browser.
Reading a file character by character is not generally sensible or efficient unless for
some reason you want to process it character by character.
Reading an Arbitrary Length: fread()
The final way you can read from a file is to use the fread() function to read an arbitrary
number of bytes from the file.This function has the following prototype:
string fread(resource fp, int length);
It reads up to length bytes,to the end of the file or network packet, whichever comes
first.