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PHP File Handling: Accessing File

Submitted by joken on Friday, January 3, 2014 - 11:03.
In this tutorial, we’re going to access file in PHP. And primarily we’re going to focus on this lesson in dealing with fopen (filename, mode) so we’re going to open a file and we’re to provide a filename and we’re going to tell it what mode is should open it. And remember using “fopen” opens up a file whether it exists or not so we will create it if necessary. At this time, we will know first how to deal with FILE ACCESS MODES: Below are the three basic ways to open a file and the corresponding character that PHP uses. This is used to specify the intentions when you open a file. r - it reads from the start of a file, this is just reading and it the file must exist if we’re going to read it. w – it Truncate or Write from start, and it erases anything what is in the file that are already existing or it creates a new file if didn't. a – it is used to append or write to the end and these can be useful especially when we are doing a log file and we just want to add one new entry and then exit the file. And using these modes offers an alternative version used for Reading and Writing into a file. The combination is done by placing a plus sign “+” after the file mode character. Read/Write: r+ - it opens a file that it can be read from and written to. Write/Read: w+ - it's going to truncate and put it at the start but then we can go ahead and write it there. Append: a+ - it puts us at the end of the file and also enable us to read write to the file. At this time we’re going to create a new PHP file called “accessFile.php” and add the following code.
  1. <?php
  2. //specify the filename and we call it as hello.txt
  3. $testfile = 'hello.txt';
  4. //and inside the if statement, we pass the $testfile variable to fopen and we specify the mode as write
  5. //and fopen return a handle as a value, and using handle is useful because we could close it
  6. if($fh = fopen($testfile, 'w')){
  7.         //close the handle
  8.         fclose($fh);
  9. }else{
  10.         //if the file can't be open..and it can prevent some error might happen
  11.         echo 'Could not open the file';
  12. }
  13.  
  14. ?>
After executing the code above, as expected it will create a new file in our document root. And it looks like as shown below.