The files’s length can be found using the filesize() function which takes the file name as its argument and returns the size of the file expressed in bytes.

So here are the steps required to read a file with PHP.

• Open a file using fopen() function.
• Get the file’s length using filesize() function.
• Read the file’s content using fread() function.
• Close the file with fclose() function.

The following example assigns the content of a text file to a variable then displays those contents on the web page.

fgets()

fgets() is used to read a file one line at a time. It requires one argument: the resource or “handle” for the file, and accepts a second argument: the length of the line. It will continue reading the line until the length-1 has been read or it reaches the end of the line or the end of the file. If the second argument is not included, it will continue reading until it reaches the end of the line.

$filename = "/home/user/guest/tmp.txt";
$file = fopen( $filename, "r" );
if( $file == false )
{
   echo ( "Error in opening file" );
   exit();
}
$filesize = filesize( $filename );
$filetext = fread( $file, $filesize );

fclose( $file );

echo $filesize;
echo $filetext";

As was mentioned earlier, the fread function uses a combination of: fopen, fread, and fclose. The file is first opened for reading using fopen with the r mode – this mode will open the file for reading, and place the pointer at the beginning of the file.

The second argument in the fread function, which is the staple for getting data out of a file. The function requires a file handle, which we have, and an integer to tell the function how much data, in bytes, it is supposed to read.

One character is equal to one byte. If you wanted to read the first five characters, then you would use five as the integer.

Writing to a File

Opening a file for writing involves three steps:

1. Open the file.
2. Write to the file.
3. Close the file.

Syntax

The output_string is the text to write to the file. See the following example of writing to a file.

$outputString='text to write';
$myFile = @fopen('Employees.txt', 'a');
fwrite($myFile, $outputString);
fclose($myFile);

File Locking

flock()

flock() is used to lock a file so that two or more people do not get access to it at the same time. This helps protect the file from being corrupted. flock() takes two arguments: a file handler and a lock type. flock() does not work with NFS or other networked file systems or with such as FAT that does not support file locking.

The code below shows how we should change Files/Solutions/AddEntry.php to protect Employees.txt from being corrupted.

Deleting Files and Directories With PHP

Deleting files with PHP can be done with the unlink function. If you want to delete the entire contents of a directory, you may want to include the files in an array, then cycle through this array with a loop, and delete the files one by one.

One of the main reasons for deleting files is to free up storage space. Deleting the entire contents of a directory is often done to make it possible to use rmdir to remove the directory itself.

Deleting a file is really simple. All you need to do is to write the path to the file that you want to delete. An example of how to delete a.html file is shown below:

unlink('my-html-file.html');

This only shows how to delete a single file, so let’s show how to delete the entire contents of a given directory.

Delete the contents of a directory

To delete the contents of a directory with php, you can use the glob function to return the contents as an array, then cycle trough this array to delete files one by one.

$aFiles = glob("Cookies/*.txt");

$n = count($aFiles);
$counter = 0;
while ($counter < $n) {
  unlink($aFiles["$counter"]);
  ++$counter;
}

You can also use a foreach loop to cycle trough the results directly, the below would delete the directory contents of “MyDirectory” one by one.

$dir = 'MyDirectory/';
  foreach(glob($dir.'*.*') as $item){
    unlink($item);
}

Deleting the directory contents is needed before you can delete the directory itself, which is done with the rmdir function, this is demonstrated in the below example:

rmdir('MyDirectory');

Copying files in PHP

Copying files can be done with the copy function of PHP. This function will also accept URLs in the source parameter, given that the fopen wrappers have been enabled.

Copying files is really simple. The below example shows how to copy a text file, renaming it in the process. Keep in mind that the destination file will be overwritten if it already exists, so it can be a good idea to rename the file if you don’t want that to happen.

$file = 'MyTextFile.txt';
$newfile = 'MyTextFile-copy.txt';

if (!copy($file, $newfile)) {
    echo "failed to copy $file.";
}

The above consists of two variables and a single if statement. The if statement will check if the file copy failed. The copying is happening inside the if-check, so do not be confused about this. It simply runs the function, and then checks the return value.

Copying Files to Directories

When copying a file to another directory, you should first create the directory before it will be possible to copy files to it. If the directory already exists, just do something like:

$source = 'MyTextFile.txt';
$destination = 'mydir/MyTextFile-copy.txt';

if (!copy($source, $destination)) {
    echo "failed to copy: $source";
}

Copying remote files

Remote files are located on other servers, copying them will mean that you have to download them. The copy function can also be used on remote files, given that the fopen wrappers are enabled.

The below example demonstrates how to use copy to download remote files. Note. You won’t be able to download the source-code of remote PHP scripts!

 if(!copy('http://example.com/myfile.txt','mydir/FileName.txt')) {
    $errors = error_get_last();
    echo $errors['type'];
    echo $errors['message'];
  }

Renaming Files with PHP

Renaming files is done with the rename function of PHP. This function not only allows you to rename files, it can also be used to move files in the renaming process. The function rename takes just 2 parameters that we care about. The first is the oldname and the second is the newname, representing the current location and file name, and the new one respectively.

  rename("/MyDIR/MyFileName.txt", "/AnotherDir/my-new-file-name.txt");

The rename function also works on URLs if the URL wrappers has been enabled, you can read more about that in the tutorials on HTTP requests.

File Renaming in PHP

Renaming files has never been easier. To rename a file that lives in a directory – without moving it to another directory – you should do like demonstrated in the below example:

 rename("/folder/old-file-name.ext", "/folder/new-file-name.ext");

Keep in mind that the rename function operates from the PHP Working Directory, as such the above examples are using root relative paths to access, rename and/or move files.

To easily find out what the current working directory is, you may want to do something like below:

 echo getcwd() . "
";

chdir('MySubDir');

// New directory after Changing using chdir to change directory!
echo getcwd() . "
";