fread
(PHP 4, PHP 5)
fread — Binary-safe file read
Description
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 or the socket timeout occurs (for network streams)
- 8192 bytes have been read (after opening userspace stream)
Parameters
Return Values
Returns the read string or FALSE on failure.
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
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
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.
Note:
Note that fread() reads from the current position of the file pointer. Use ftell() to find the current position of the pointer and rewind() to rewind the pointer position.
See Also
- fwrite() - Binary-safe file write
- fopen() - Opens file or URL
- fsockopen() - Open Internet or Unix domain socket connection
- popen() - Opens process file pointer
- fgets() - Gets line from file pointer
- fgetss() - Gets line from file pointer and strip HTML tags
- fscanf() - Parses input from a file according to a format
- file() - Reads entire file into an array
- fpassthru() - Output all remaining data on a file pointer
- ftell() - Returns the current position of the file read/write pointer
- rewind() - Rewind the position of a file pointer