Syntax#

• int readfile ( string $filename [, bool $use_include_path = false [, resource $context ]] )

Parameters#

1. Strings in nature.
   • File names can be passed directly. If values of other types are passed, they are cast to string. This is especially useful with SplFileInfo, which is the value in the iteration of DirectoryIterator.
2. Relative or absolute.
   • They may be absolute. On Unix-like systems, absolute paths start with /, e.g. /home/user/file.txt, while on Windows, absolute paths start with the drive, e.g. C:/Users/user/file.txt
   • They may also be relative, which is dependent on the value of getcwd and subject to change by chdir.
3. Accept protocols.
   • They may begin with scheme:// to specify the protocol wrapper to manage with. For example, file_get_contents("https://example.com") retrieves content from https://example.com.
4. Slash-compatible.
   • While the DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR on Windows is a backslash, and the system returns backslashes for paths by default, the developer can still use / as the directory separator. Therefore, for compatibility, developers can use / as directory separators on all systems, but be aware that the values returned by the functions (e.g. realpath) may contain backslashes.

Deleting files and directories

Deleting files

The unlink function deletes a single file and returns whether the operation was successful.

$filename = '/path/to/file.txt';

if (file_exists($filename)) {
    $success = unlink($filename);
    
    if (!$success) {
         throw new Exception("Cannot delete $filename");
    }
}

Deleting directories, with recursive deletion

On the other hand, directories should be deleted with rmdir. However, this function only deletes empty directories. To delete a directory with files, delete the files in the directories first. If the directory contains subdirectories, recursion may be needed.

The following example scans files in a directory, deletes member files/directories recursively, and returns the number of files (not directories) deleted.

function recurse_delete_dir(string $dir) : int {
    $count = 0;

    // ensure that $dir ends with a slash so that we can concatenate it with the filenames directly
    $dir = rtrim($dir, "/\\") . "/";

    // use dir() to list files
    $list = dir($dir);

    // store the next file name to $file. if $file is false, that's all -- end the loop.
    while(($file = $list->read()) !== false) {
        if($file === "." || $file === "..") continue;
        if(is_file($dir . $file)) {
            unlink($dir . $file);
            $count++;
        } elseif(is_dir($dir . $file)) {
            $count += recurse_delete_dir($dir . $file);
        }
    }

    // finally, safe to delete directory!
    rmdir($dir);

    return $count;
}

Convenience functions

Raw direct IO

file_get_contents and file_put_contents provide the ability to read/write from/to a file to/from a PHP string in a single call.

file_put_contents can also be used with the FILE_APPEND bitmask flag to append to, instead of truncate and overwrite, the file. It can be used along with LOCK_EX bitmask to acquire an exclusive lock to the file while proceeding to writing. Bitmask flags can be joined with the | bitwise-OR operator.

$path = "file.txt";
// reads contents in file.txt to $contents
$contents = file_get_contents($path);
// let's change something... for example, convert the CRLF to LF!
$contents = str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $contents);
// now write it back to file.txt, replacing the original contents
file_put_contents($path, $contents);

FILE_APPEND is handy for appending to log files while LOCK_EX helps prevent race condition of file writing from multiple processes. For example, to write to a log file about the current session:

file_put_contents("logins.log", "{$_SESSION["username"]} logged in", FILE_APPEND | LOCK_EX);

CSV IO

fgetcsv($file, $length, $separator)

The fgetcsv parses line from open file checking for csv fields. It returns CSV fields in an array on success or FALSE on failure.

By default, it will read only one line of the CSV file.

$file = fopen("contacts.csv","r");
print_r(fgetcsv($file));    
print_r(fgetcsv($file,5," "));
fclose($file); 

contacts.csv

Kai Jim, Refsnes, Stavanger, Norway
Hege, Refsnes, Stavanger, Norway

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => Kai Jim
    [1] => Refsnes
    [2] => Stavanger
    [3] => Norway
)
Array
(
    [0] => Hege,
)

Reading a file to stdout directly

readfile copies a file to the output buffer. readfile() will not present any memory issues, even when sending large files, on its own.

$file = 'monkey.gif';

if (file_exists($file)) {
    header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
    header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($file).'"');
    header('Expires: 0');
    header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
    header('Pragma: public');
    header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($file));
    readfile($file);
    exit;
}

Or from a file pointer

Alternatively, to seek a point in the file to start copying to stdout, use fpassthru instead. In the following example, the last 1024 bytes are copied to stdout:

$fh = fopen("file.txt", "rb");
fseek($fh, -1024, SEEK_END); 
fpassthru($fh);

Reading a file into an array

file returns the lines in the passed file in an array. Each element of the array corresponds to a line in the file, with the newline still attached.

print_r(file("test.txt"));

test.txt

Welcome to File handling
This is to test file handling

Output:

Array 
( 
    [0] => Welcome to File handling 
    [1] => This is to test file handling 
)

Getting file information

Check if a path is a directory or a file

The is_dir function returns whether the argument is a directory, while is_file returns whether the argument is a file. Use file_exists to check if it is either.

$dir  = "/this/is/a/directory";
$file = "/this/is/a/file.txt";

echo is_dir($dir) ? "$dir is a directory" : "$dir is not a directory", PHP_EOL,
    is_file($dir) ? "$dir is a file" : "$dir is not a file", PHP_EOL,
    file_exists($dir) ? "$dir exists" : "$dir doesn't exist", PHP_EOL,
    is_dir($file) ? "$file is a directory" : "$file is not a directory", PHP_EOL,
    is_file($file) ? "$file is a file" : "$file is not a file", PHP_EOL,
    file_exists($file) ? "$file exists" : "$file doesn't exist", PHP_EOL;

This gives:

/this/is/a/directory is a directory
/this/is/a/directory is not a file
/this/is/a/directory exists
/this/is/a/file.txt is not a directory
/this/is/a/file.txt is a file
/this/is/a/file.txt exists

Checking file type

Use filetype to check the type of a file, which may be:

• fifo
• char
• dir
• block
• link
• file
• socket
• unknown

Passing the filename to the filetype directly:

echo filetype("~"); // dir

Note that filetype returns false and triggers an E_WARNING if the file doesn’t exist.

Checking readability and writability

Passing the filename to the is_writable and is_readable functions check whether the file is writable or readable respectively.

The functions return false gracefully if the file does not exist.

Checking file access/modify time

Using filemtime and fileatime returns the timestamp of the last modification or access of the file. The return value is a Unix timestamp — see https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/php/425/working-with-dates-and-time for details.

echo "File was last modified on " . date("Y-m-d", filemtime("file.txt"));
echo "File was last accessed on " . date("Y-m-d", fileatime("file.txt"));

Get path parts with fileinfo

$fileToAnalyze = ('/var/www/image.png');

$filePathParts = pathinfo($fileToAnalyze);

echo '<pre>';
   print_r($filePathParts);
echo '</pre>';

This example will output:

Array
(
    [dirname] => /var/www
    [basename] => image.png
    [extension] => png
    [filename] => image
)

Which can be used as:

$filePathParts['dirname']
$filePathParts['basename']
$filePathParts['extension']
$filePathParts['filename']

• If an option (the second parameter) is not passed, an associative array is returned otherwise a string is returned.
• Does not validate that the file exists.
• Simply parses the string into parts. No validation is done on the file (no mime-type checking, etc.)
• The extension is simply the last extension of $path The path for the file image.jpg.png would be .png even if it technically a .jpg file. A file without an extension will not return an extension element in the array.

Minimize memory usage when dealing with large files

If we need to parse a large file, e.g. a CSV more than 10 Mbytes containing millions of rows, some use file or file_get_contents functions and end up with hitting memory_limit setting with

Allowed memory size of XXXXX bytes exhausted

error. Consider the following source (top-1m.csv has exactly 1 million rows and is about 22 Mbytes of size)

var_dump(memory_get_usage(true));
$arr = file('top-1m.csv');
var_dump(memory_get_usage(true));

This outputs:

int(262144)
int(210501632) 

because the interpreter needed to hold all the rows in $arr array, so it consumed ~200 Mbytes of RAM. Note that we haven’t even done anything with the contents of the array.

Now consider the following code:

var_dump(memory_get_usage(true));
$index = 1;
if (($handle = fopen("top-1m.csv", "r")) !== FALSE) {
    while (($row = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
        file_put_contents('top-1m-reversed.csv',$index . ',' . strrev($row[1]) . PHP_EOL, FILE_APPEND);
        $index++;
    }
    fclose($handle);
}
var_dump(memory_get_usage(true));

which outputs

int(262144)
int(262144)

so we don’t use a single extra byte of memory, but parse the whole CSV and save it to another file reversing the value of the 2nd column. That’s because fgetcsv reads only one row and $row is overwritten in every loop.

Stream-based file IO

Opening a stream

fopen opens a file stream handle, which can be used with various functions for reading, writing, seeking and other functions on top of it. This value is of resource type, and cannot be passed to other threads persisting its functionality.

$f = fopen("errors.log", "a"); // Will try to open errors.log for writing

The second parameter is the mode of the file stream:

Adding a t behind the mode (e.g. a+b, wt, etc.) in Windows will translate "\n" line endings to "\r\n" when working with the file. Add b behind the mode if this is not intended, especially if it is a binary file.

The PHP application should close streams using fclose when they are no longer used to prevent the Too many open files error. This is particularly important in CLI programs, since the streams are only closed when the runtime shuts down — this means that in web servers, it may not be necessary (but still should, as a practice to prevent resource leak) to close the streams if you do not expect the process to run for a long time, and will not open many streams.

Reading

Using fread will read the given number of bytes from the file pointer, or until an EOF is met.

Reading lines

Using fgets will read the file until an EOL is reached, or the given length is read.

Both fread and fgets will move the file pointer while reading.

Reading everything remaining

Using stream_get_contents will all remaining bytes in the stream into a string and return it.

Adjusting file pointer position

Initially after opening the stream, the file pointer is at the beginning of the file (or the end, if the mode a is used). Using the fseek function will move the file pointer to a new position, relative to one of three values:

• SEEK_SET: This is the default value; the file position offset will be relative to the beginning of the file.
• SEEK_CUR: The file position offset will be relative to the current position.
• SEEK_END: The file position offset will be relative to the end of the file. Passing a negative offset is the most common use for this value; it will move the file position to the specified number of bytes before the end of file.

rewind is a convenience shortcut of fseek($fh, 0, SEEK_SET).

Using ftell will show the absolute position of the file pointer.

For example, the following script reads skips the first 10 bytes, reads the next 10 bytes, skips 10 bytes, reads the next 10 bytes, and then the last 10 bytes in file.txt:

$fh = fopen("file.txt", "rb");
fseek($fh, 10); // start at offset 10
echo fread($fh, 10); // reads 10 bytes
fseek($fh, 10, SEEK_CUR); // skip 10 bytes
echo fread($fh, 10); // read 10 bytes
fseek($fh, -10, SEEK_END); // skip to 10 bytes before EOF
echo fread($fh, 10); // read 10 bytes
fclose($fh);

Writing

Using fwrite writes the provided string to the file starting at the current file pointer.

fwrite($fh, "Some text here\n");

Moving and Copying files and directories

Copying files

copy copies the source file in the first argument to the destination in the second argument. The resolved destination needs to be in a directory that is already created.

if (copy('test.txt', 'dest.txt')) {
    echo 'File has been copied successfully';
} else {
    echo 'Failed to copy file to destination given.'
}

Copying directories, with recursion

Copying directories is pretty much similar to deleting directories, except that for files copy instead of unlink is used, while for directories, mkdir instead of rmdir is used, at the beginning instead of being at the end of the function.

function recurse_delete_dir(string $src, string $dest) : int {
    $count = 0;

    // ensure that $src and $dest end with a slash so that we can concatenate it with the filenames directly
    $src = rtrim($dest, "/\\") . "/";
    $dest = rtrim($dest, "/\\") . "/";

    // use dir() to list files
    $list = dir($src);

    // create $dest if it does not already exist
    @mkdir($dest);

    // store the next file name to $file. if $file is false, that's all -- end the loop.
    while(($file = $list->read()) !== false) {
        if($file === "." || $file === "..") continue;
        if(is_file($src . $file)) {
            copy($src . $file, $dest . $file);
            $count++;
        } elseif(is_dir($src . $file)) {
            $count += recurse_copy_dir($src . $file, $dest . $file);
        }
    }

    return $count;
}

Renaming/Moving

Renaming/Moving files and directories is much simpler. Whole directories can be moved or renamed in a single call, using the rename function.

• rename("~/file.txt", "~/file.html");

• rename("~/dir", "~/old_dir");

• rename("~/dir/file.txt", "~/dir2/file.txt");