Re: File-handling

gustav@varupiraten.se wrote: > Hi there! > > Can someone explain the major difference between fgets and fopen? Which is > the best together with plain textfiles? and why? fgets can be handy to read a large file one LINE at a time. This is most useful in files that are line-based, such as SQL data dumps, CSV files, text files, config files, etc. when you want to process their contents a line at a time and do something to the data. fget lets you read an arbitrary amount of data -- this is useful if you just want to transfer the data from point A to B without interpreting it, or if the data is binary and has some sort of internal byte-structure you need to tear apart to process it. For small files, you might as well just use http://php.net/file or other functions that deal with the whole file at once -- You only really want to mess with fopen/fget|fgets/fclose if you have files that could potentially be HUGE, and you can read a chunk at a time, deal with it, and read some more -- Avoiding trying to suck the whole thing into RAM all at once. > When using fget. Is it something special you should think when taking care > of line-breaks? (/n, /r/n ...) If your data could potentially be coming from Mac, PC, and/or Linux instead of just one platform, you'll have to write some code to figure out what to do with line-breaks. Since I'm always on Linux servers, I generally do: $data = str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $data); //PC -> Linux $data = str_replace("\r", "\n", $data); //Mac -> Linux This converts everything to Linux format, which is what I'll use internally. Note that the order of the two lines is crucial -- If you flip-flop them, you'll make a real mess. If you're not trying to change the data, nor interpret it, you needn't worry about the newlines. > eof and feof. What's the difF? *don't get it* EOF is an acronym for End Of File. feof is the function used to determine if a file has reached its EOF -- that is, if you have successfully read all of the data, and there is no more data to read, and the file still seems kosher, so you're DONE. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm