fgets()¶

fgets() is a PHP native function that reads a single line from an open file pointer, up to and including the next newline character, or until an optional length limit of bytes is reached. It returns the line as a string, or false when the end of file, EOF, is reached.

Key characteristics:

Stops at the first \n found, or after length - 1 bytes if a length is provided
The trailing newline is kept in the returned string, and often needs to be trimmed with rtrim() or trim()
Binary-safe

fgets() is the standard way to process a text file line by line, for instance log files or CSV files, without loading the whole file into memory, unlike file() or file_get_contents(). It is commonly combined with feof() to detect the end of the stream.

<?php

    $fp = fopen('access.log', 'r');
    if ($fp) {
        while (($line = fgets($fp)) !== false) {
            echo trim($line) . PHP_EOL;
        }
        fclose($fp);
    }

?>

Documentation

fgets()¶

PHP Dictionary

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