Chapter 18. Files

18.1. Introduction

$fh = fopen('/tmp/cookie-data','w')      or die("can't open file");
if (-1 == fwrite($fh,$_COOKIE['flavor'])) { die("can't write data"); }
fclose($fh)                              or die("can't close file");

As with other processes, PHP must have the correct permissions to read from and write to a file. This is usually straightforward in a command-line context but can cause confusion when running scripts within a web server. Your web server (and consequently your PHP scripts) probably runs as a specific user dedicated to web serving (or perhaps as user nobody). For good security reasons, this user often has restricted permissions on what files it can access. If your script is having trouble with a file operation, make sure the web server's user or group — not yours — has permission to perform that file operation. Some web serving setups may run your script as you, though, in which case you need to make sure that your scripts can't accidentally read or write personal files that aren't part of your web site.

Because most file-handling functions just return false on error, you have to do some additional work to find more details about that error. When the track_errors configuration directive is on, each error message is put in the global variable $php_errormsg. Including this variable as part of your error output makes debugging easier:

$fh = fopen('/tmp/cookie-data','w')      or die("can't open: $php_errormsg");
if (-1 == fwrite($fh,$_COOKIE['flavor'])) { die("can't write: $php_errormsg") };
fclose($fh)                              or die("can't close: $php_errormsg");

If you don't have permission to write to the /tmp/cookie-data, the example dies with this error output:

can't open: fopen("/tmp/cookie-data", "w") - Permission denied

$fh = fopen('/tmp/lines-of-data.txt','r') or die($php_errormsg);
while($s = fgets($fh,1024)) {
    $s = rtrim($s);
    // do something with $s ... 
}
fclose($fh)                               or die($php_errormsg);

This function removes any trailing whitespace in the line, including ASCII 13 and ASCII 10 (as well as tab and space). If there's whitespace at the end of a line that you want to preserve, but you still want to remove carriage returns and line feeds, use an appropriate regular expression:

$fh = fopen('/tmp/lines-of-data.txt','r') or die($php_errormsg);
while($s = fgets($fh,1024)) {
    $s = preg_replace('/\r?\n$/','',$s);
    // do something with $s ... 
}
fclose($fh)                               or die($php_errormsg);

$fh = fopen('c:/alligator/crocodile menu.txt','r') or die($php_errormsg);
while($s = fgets($fh,1024)) {
    print $s;
}
fclose($fh)                                        or die($php_errormsg);

This piece of code also takes advantage of the fact that Windows filenames aren't case-sensitive. However, Unix filenames are.

Sorting out linebreak confusion isn't only a problem in your code that reads and writes files but in your source code as well. If you have multiple people working on a project, make sure all developers configure their editors to use the same kind of linebreaks.

$fh = fopen('orders.txt','r') or die($php_errormsg);
while (! feof($fh)) {
    $s = fgets($fh,256);
    process_order($s);
}
fclose($fh) or die($php_errormsg);

If orders.txt has a 300-byte line, fgets( ) returns only the first 256 bytes. The next fgets( ) returns the next 44 bytes and stops when it finds the newline. The next fgets( ) moves to the next line of the file. Examples in this chapter generally give fgets( ) a second argument of 1048576: 1 MB. This is longer than lines in most text files, but the presence of such an outlandish number should serve as a reminder to consider your maximum expected line length when using fgets().