PHP Include Single Line of a File

only want to include line 1 of a file

[cookiemonster]

Hi,

I have a file which I want to include via PHP, however I only want to include the first line of the file. Breaking up the file is not currently an option.
Is there any way that I can only include one line of a file using PHP?

PS. The file to be included does not necessarily need to be a .PHP file - it can be .txt, etc so options such as readfile() are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

[Frank_Rizzo]

fgets() will read a file line by line.

<?php
$myfile = "test.txt";
$file = fopen($myfile, "r") or exit("Unable to open file!");

$lines_read = 0;
$first_line = '';

while(!feof($file) && $lines_read < 1) {
 $lines_read++;
 $first_line = fgets($file);
 }
fclose($file);

if($lines_read == 1) {
 echo "The first line of $myfile reads: $first_line";
} else {
 echo "Could not read from file";
}

?>

[Readie]

Much more simple:

$file = file('/path/to/file.txt');
echo $file[0];

[cookiemonster]

Thank you, Readie - you have saved my day yet again!

[Readie]

:) happy to help.

An improvement on my code by the way:

echo ($file = file('path/to/file.php', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES))? $file[0] : 'Unable to read file';

Error on failure, removes the \n from the end of the string.

[penders]

FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES

I've found this flag doesn't work too well under windows, when the file being read has \r\n line endings. Instead use rtrim() on the result to remove the line ending.

[cookiemonster]

Readie, thanks for the improvement, but I won't be using it -
Returning nothing on error was actually a bonus for my specific situation, and the \n was no problem for me.

[Readie]

Well, you can remove the error message - it's better code, as you won't return an E_NOTICE undefined index when it fails.

Penders:

I didn't know that FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES failed on Windows - so thanks for that.

My personal servers, and all the servers we run at work are Linux, so I can take that liberty though :)

[cookiemonster]

Hmmm .... alrighty, I'll try it out later and let you know how it goes.

[rocknbil]

I've found this flag doesn't work too well under windows

I mentioned this the other day in this thread [webmasterworld.com] (see PHP comments,) and the test was on a 'nix server . . . but it might be something I was doing wrong <shrug>.

[Readie]

 $len = count($fields); // So Readie doesn't yell at me. :-) 

Lol :)

I sort of jumped to the end of that thread when I read it the first time ^^

--- EDIT

Re-reading that code and the comments you wrote on that thread rock, did you try this?:

$file = ('/path/to/file.txt', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES);

[rocknbil]

Nah, project for another day. What was weird is rtrim() didn't seem to help either.