Working with text files - Opening a text file
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The first thing to do is to open a text file in your web directory. To open a text file, the file should exist in the given path. In the file you are trying to open can't be found, you can have PHP to create a new one for you.
To open a file in PHP, we simply use fopen() function. At the point we open the selected file, we need to specify how we intend to use it after opening. So, that means before opening a file using PHP's fopen(), we need to plan for what type of purposes we hope to use the opened file. This is called "File mode".
File Modes :* Opening a file for reading only, for writing only or for both.* When you write to the file, you might want to overwrite current data in it or write new data without overwriting existing.
fopen() functionWhen fopen() is called, there are two parameters. The first parameter should be the file you want to open. You can specify a directory path to this file as shown below:
<?php
$fp = fopen( "notes/data/names.txt" , "w" );
?> |
The second parameter of this function is the file mode. This parameter indicates what you are planning to do with the opened file. In above case we are using "w", so that means open the file for writing.
For more information about file modes : http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php
If fopen() opens the file successfully, a pointer to the file is returned and will be stored in a variable, in above case $fp. You must use that variable whenever you want to work with the opened file.
When an error occurs while calling fopen() the function returns false. You could handle this error situation in a user-friendly way.
<?php
$fp = fopen( "notes/data/names.txt", "w" );
if(!$fp)
{
echo "Couldn't open the data file. Try again later.";
exit;
}
?> |
Next: Writing data into a text file >>
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