SOURCE CODE DOWNLOAD

Click here to download all the example source code, I have released it under the MIT license, so feel free to build on top of it or use it in your own project.

QUICK START

• Download and unzip into a folder.
• Hooray! There is no database involved, so just follow through each of the files contained within.

1. CREATING FILES

• Two of the most important file functions in PHP are fopen and fclose.
• fopen(FILE, MODE) will open a specified file, and there are several read/write modes – I shall leave a link to the official PHP manual where you can get the full list of modes in the extras section below.
• The 'w' mode here means “write only” – It will attempt to create the file if it is not found. Please do also take note that it will truncate the existing file (remove all existing contents in the file), so please use this with caution.
• fclose(STREAM) will properly close the file. Some online tutorials somehow miss this one out, but I will personally stress – Please close the files properly, or you migh get a corrupted file.

2. READING FILES

READ LINE-BY-LINE

• As with creating new files, we use the fopen function to read existing files – But we use 'r' mode instead of 'w'.
• The 'r' mode means “read-only”, and it will place the file pointer at the start of the file (start reading from the top).
• Next, we simply use the fgets(STREAM) function to read the file line-by-line.
• Finally, remember to close the file, even if it is for reading only.

READ SPECIFIC BYTES

Opps. Have a file that does not have proper line breaks?

• Instead of using fgets, we will use while (!feof) to continuously loop until the end of file.
• Then using fread, we can specify the number of bytes to fetch from the file.

3. WRITE TO FILE

• Same old story – Open the file with fopen, close with fclose when done.
• To write data to the file, we use the fwrite(STREAM, DATA) function.

4. APPEND TO FILE (WRITE ARRAY TO FILE)

 "World", 
  "ID" => 123, 
  "Name" => "John Doe"
];
foreach ($data as $k=>$v) {
  $line = "[$k] - $v\r\n";
  fwrite($stream, $line);
}

// (3) CLOSE - MAKE SURE IT WRITES PROPERLY
fclose($stream) or die("Error closing " . $file);

// (4) FILE WRITE OK - DO YOUR THING
echo "OK";
?>

• Appending to an existing file is as easy as changing the 'w' mode in fopen to 'a'.
• However, it is a good idea to check if the file exists first.

• Writing an array (multiple lines) to the file is also straightforward, just run through the array with a foreach loop and use \r\n to add line breaks.

5. COPY A FILE

This should be very self-explanatory… Just use the copy(SOURCE, DESTINATION) function.

6. RENAME A FILE

Yep, another self-explanatory process. Just use the rename(SOURCE, DESTINATION) function.

7. MOVE A FILE

Move uses the same rename function, except that we define a different destination folder.

8. DELETING FILES

To delete a file, we use the unlink(FILE) function. Take note – it is permanent and will skip the recycle bin.

9. TOUCH!?

The final file related PHP function that we are going to touch on, is touch(FILE, TIMESTAMP). Yep, this is kind of a weird function, as it only updates the modified date of the file and not change the contents… Might still be useful if you use the timestamp for some process?

THE SUMMARY

REFERENCES

• fopen
• fclose 
• fgets
• feof
• fread
• fwrite
• copy
• rename
• unlink
• touch

LINKS

• Need more ways to read files?
• If you are having problems with the file paths.

INFOGRAPHIC CHEAT SHEET

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