Re: PHP Variables sizes

On Sun, April 23, 2006 10:43 pm, David Killen wrote: > Is there a maximum size for a variable in PHP. A client of mine is > having problems working with a file of around 4Mb. Not really being a > php developer I cannot really answer him. To quote him: > > We are not uploading excel from ftp. We are reading excel file which > is > about 4 MB. In php settings maximum size of any variable is set to 2 > MB so > this setting has to change. As any file reading in a variable will > only read > up to 2 MB and then it will stop. > > I wasn't aware of any setting that allows you to change the max > variable > size. Can anyone shed any light on this? As far as I know, there is no limit to the size of a single variable. The whole script has a limit in php.ini memory_limit <?php phpinfo();?> will tell you what that is if you can't read php.ini If it's not possible to alter memory_limit (on a shared server, for example) you may have to re-structure the application to read only PART of the file at a time, and deal with it piece-meal. This clearly will not work for, say, imagecreatefromjpeg() But for something like ripping through a CSV file and shoving it into a database, or reading any kind of text file, really, you can (and should) do it line by line if it's likely to be a "large" file. If you are running PHP from the command line, note that you can override php.ini or (in more recent versions) override a specific setting within php.ini directly from the command line. php -h on the command line should make the "how" obvious, and you'll need to do that to figure out whether you need a whole new php.ini or can override a single setting anyway. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm