Basic File Handling in PHP

5 min read - Last updated on: 29 November 2024

PHP has different different method or functions for creating, reading, uploading, writing, closing, deleting files.

1 - What is file handling in PHP?

Before going to understand about file handling, you should first know what is file?

– File is nothing but a sequence of bytes stored in a group.

– File are used to store your information and if you can make changes in your file whenever you want like:

Opening & Closing File
Creating File
Reading File
Writing File
Editing File

2 - Opening & Closing a File

Before doing any activity with files you need to open the file, also when you are going to open file then you can set mode, in which you want to open. Mode will be like read, write etc.

Modes	Description
r	Read only. Pointers at the beginning of the file
r+	Read and Write both. Pointers at the beginning of the file
w	Write only. Opens and clears the contents of file; or creates a new file if it doesn’t exist
w+	Read and Write both. Opens and clears the contents of file or creates a new file if it doesn’t exist
a	Append. Opens and writes to the end of the file or creates a new file if it doesn’t exist
a+	Read and Append both. Preserves file content by writing to the end of the file
x	Write only. Creates a new file. Returns FALSE and an error if file already exists
x+	Read and Write both. Creates a new file. Returns FALSE and an error if file already exists

Open a File :

You can use fopen() function to open a file in PHP.

fopen() function takes two arguments, first contains the name of the file and second contains the mode of file.

Example:

$my_file = 'myfile.txt';
$handle = fopen($my_file, 'w') or die('Cannot open file:  '.$my_file);

Read a File :

You can use fread() function to read a file in PHP.

Example:

$my_file = 'myfile.txt';
$handle = fopen($my_file, 'r');
$data = fread($handle,filesize($my_file));

Write to a File :

You can use fwrite() function to write to a file in PHP.

Example:

$my_file = 'myfile.txt';
$handle = fopen($my_file, 'w') or die('Cannot open file:  '.$my_file);
$data = 'This is the data which you have to write in your file';
fwrite($handle, $data);

Close a File :

You can use fclose() function to close a file in PHP.

Example:

$my_file = 'myfile.txt';
$handle = fopen($my_file, 'w') or die('Cannot open file:  '.$my_file);
//write some data here
fclose($handle);

Delete a File :

You can use unlink() function to delete a file in PHP.

Example:

$my_file = 'myfile.txt';
unlink($my_file);

Reading a File Line by Line :

The fgets() function is used to read a single line from a file and then file pointer is pointing to the next line in the file. so by this way we can read file line by line.

Example:

$file = fopen("myfile.txt", "r") or exit("Unable to open the file!");
while(!feof($file))
{
echo fgets($file). "<br>";
}
fclose($file);

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