PHP: Binary-safe file read

Description

string fread ( resource $handle , int $length )

fread() reads up to length bytes from the file pointer referenced by handle . Reading stops as soon as one of the following conditions is met:

length bytes have been read
EOF (end of file) is reached
a packet becomes available (for network streams)
8192 bytes have been read (after opening userspace stream)

Parameters

handle: A file system pointer resource that is typically created using fopen().
length: Up to length number of bytes read.

Return Values

Returns the read string or FALSE in case of error.

Examples

Example #1 A simple fread() example


<?php

// get contents of a file into a string

$filename = "/usr/local/something.txt";

$handle = fopen($filename, "r");

$contents = fread($handle, filesize($filename));

fclose($handle);

?>

Example #2 Binary fread() example

Warning

On systems which differentiate between binary and text files (i.e. Windows) the file must be opened with 'b' included in fopen() mode parameter.


<?php

$filename = "c:\files\somepic.gif";

$handle = fopen($filename, "rb");

$contents = fread($handle, filesize($filename));

fclose($handle);

?>

Example #3 Remote fread() examples

Warning

When reading from anything that is not a regular local file, such as streams returned when reading remote files or from popen() and fsockopen(), reading will stop after a packet is available. This means that you should collect the data together in chunks as shown in the examples below.


<?php

// For PHP 5 and up

$handle = fopen("http://www.example.com/", "rb");

$contents = stream_get_contents($handle);

fclose($handle);

?>


<?php

$handle = fopen("http://www.example.com/", "rb");

$contents = '';

while (!feof($handle)) {

  $contents .= fread($handle, 8192);

}

fclose($handle);

?>

Notes

Note: If you just want to get the contents of a file into a string, use file_get_contents() as it has much better performance than the code above.

fread

Description

Parameters

Return Values

Examples

Notes

See Also