Amount of characters a variable is able to contain

This is a sample of code which takes the $web_page and puts it into $message The problem I have is that I have lines in my $web_page files which are longer (have more characters) than $message is able to handle and chunks of web page text are simply truncated after the character limit has been reached. Is there a way to deal with this and allow $message (for example) to hold 500 or 1,000 characters --- twice of whatever the default setting is? Ron $lineArray = file($web_page); // make an empty variable first $message = ""; // concat all array element foreach($lineArray as $eachLine) { $message .= $eachLine; }