Last updated: Fri, 22 Aug 2008

file_get_contents

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)

file_get_contents — Reads entire file into a string

Description

string file_get_contents ( string $filename [, int $flags [, resource $context [, int $offset [, int $maxlen ]]]] )

This function is similar to file(), except that file_get_contents() returns the file in a string, starting at the specified offset up to maxlen bytes. On failure, file_get_contents() will return FALSE.

file_get_contents() is the preferred way to read the contents of a file into a string. It will use memory mapping techniques if supported by your OS to enhance performance.

Note: If you're opening a URI with special characters, such as spaces, you need to encode the URI with urlencode().

Parameters

filename

Name of the file to read.

flags

Warning

For all versions prior to PHP 6, this parameter is called use_include_path and is a bool. The flags parameter is only available since PHP 6. If you use an older version and want to search for filename in the include path, this parameter must be TRUE. Since PHP 6, you have to use the FILE_USE_INCLUDE_PATH flag instead.

The value of flags can be any combination of the following flags (with some restrictions), joined with the binary OR (|) operator.

**Available flags**
Flag	Description
`FILE_USE_INCLUDE_PATH`	Search for `filename` in the include directory. See include_path for more information.
`FILE_TEXT`	If unicode semantics are enabled, the default encoding of the read data is UTF-8. You can specify a different encoding by creating a custom context or by changing the default using stream_default_encoding(). This flag cannot be used with `FILE_BINARY`.
`FILE_BINARY`	With this flag, the file is read in binary mode. This is the default setting and cannot be used with `FILE_TEXT`.

context

A valid context resource created with stream_context_create(). If you don't need to use a custom context, you can skip this parameter by NULL.

offset

The offset where the reading starts.

maxlen

Maximum length of data read.

Return Values

The function returns the read data or FALSE on failure.

ChangeLog

Version	Description
5.0.0	Added context support.
5.1.0	Added the `offset` and `maxlen` parameters.
6.0.0	The `use_include_path` parameter was replaced by the `flags` parameter.

Notes

Note: This function is binary-safe.

Tip

A URL can be used as a filename with this function if the fopen wrappers have been enabled. See fopen() for more details on how to specify the filename and List of Supported Protocols/Wrappers for a list of supported URL protocols.

Warning

When using SSL, Microsoft IIS will violate the protocol by closing the connection without sending a close_notify indicator. PHP will report this as "SSL: Fatal Protocol Error" when you reach the end of the data. To work around this, the value of error_reporting should be lowered to a level that does not include warnings. PHP 4.3.7 and higher can detect buggy IIS server software when you open the stream using the https:// wrapper and will suppress the warning. When using fsockopen() to create an ssl:// socket, the developer is responsible for detecting and suppressing this warning.


In response to EOD (07-Aug-2008 08:34) - this function is not designed to parse php files.  It only returns the full contents of any file into a string.



If you're looking to parse a php file and output the full results into a string, you could use the ob_ functions wrapped around an 'include' instead:



<?php



    ob_start();

    include($filename);

    $return_str = ob_get_contents();

    ob_end_clean();



?>

colnector bla-at_bla colnect.com
10-Aug-2008 04:34


A UTF-8 issue I've encountered is that of reading a URL with a non-UTF-8 encoding that is later displayed improperly since file_get_contents() related to it as UTF-8. This small function should show you how to address this issue:





<?php


function file_get_contents_utf8($fn) {


     $content = file_get_contents($fn);


      return mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8', 


          mb_detect_encoding($content, 'UTF-8, ISO-8859-1', true));


}


?>

EOD
07-Aug-2008 07:34


if $filename has a relative path file_get_contents returns the uninterpreted sourcecode of the php-file with all comments etc.



I don't know whether this is a bug or intented or caused by server-configuration.



I think this behaviour should be included in the description of the function.

daniele dot ricci at staff dot dada dot net
05-Aug-2008 06:13


I recently upgraded my server to Slackware 12.0.



After this, a program of mine stopped working: the call to file_get_contents (to an URL served by a custom HTTP server) was returning false without generating any error!



After some investigations I saw this: my custom HTTP server closes the connection at the end of the content. This (without the header "Connection: close") seems to cause the problem I described.



To solve the problem I simply added that header to the answer of my custom HTTP server.

pascalxusPLEASENOSPAM at yahoo dot com
18-Jul-2008 07:17


if( false == ($str=file_get_contents( '../relative_path/test.txt' )))

    echo "Could not read file.";

  else

    echo "File contents: $str";



  # Note: if the file cannot be opened then file_get_contents will attempt to warn the following:

  # Warning: file_get_contents(filename): failed to open stream

http://www.codesplunk.com/nr/questions/php1.html

joachimb at gmail dot com
15-Apr-2008 04:38


Setting the timeout properly without messing with ini values:





<?php


$ctx = stream_context_create(array(


    'http' => array(


        'timeout' => 1


        )


    )


);


file_get_contents("http://example.com/", 0, $ctx);


?>

3n1gm4 [at] gmail [dot] com
02-Apr-2008 03:12


This is a nice and simple substitute to get_file_contents() using curl, it returns FALSE if $contents is empty.



<?php

function curl_get_file_contents($URL)

    {

        $c = curl_init();

        curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

        curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);

        $contents = curl_exec($c);

        curl_close($c);



        if ($contents) return $contents;

            else return FALSE;

    }

?>



Hope this help, if there is something wrong or something you don't understand let me know :)

jose dot nobile at gmail dot com
29-Jan-2008 01:29


<?PHP

//PHP 4.2.x Compatibility function

if (!function_exists('file_get_contents')) {

      function file_get_contents($filename, $incpath = false, $resource_context = null)

      {

          if (false === $fh = fopen($filename, 'rb', $incpath)) {

              trigger_error('file_get_contents() failed to open stream: No such file or directory', E_USER_WARNING);

              return false;

          }

  

          clearstatcache();

          if ($fsize = @filesize($filename)) {

              $data = fread($fh, $fsize);

          } else {

              $data = '';

              while (!feof($fh)) {

                  $data .= fread($fh, 8192);

              }

          }

  

          fclose($fh);

          return $data;

      }

  }

?>

php [spat] hm2k.org
15-Jan-2008 05:58


I decided to make a similar function to this, called file_post_contents, it uses POST instead of GET to call, kinda handy...



<?php

function file_post_contents($url,$headers=false) {

    $url = parse_url($url);



    if (!isset($url['port'])) {

      if ($url['scheme'] == 'http') { $url['port']=80; }

      elseif ($url['scheme'] == 'https') { $url['port']=443; }

    }

    $url['query']=isset($url['query'])?$url['query']:'';



    $url['protocol']=$url['scheme'].'://';

    $eol="\r\n";



    $headers =  "POST ".$url['protocol'].$url['host'].$url['path']." HTTP/1.0".$eol. 

                "Host: ".$url['host'].$eol. 

                "Referer: ".$url['protocol'].$url['host'].$url['path'].$eol. 

                "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded".$eol. 

                "Content-Length: ".strlen($url['query']).$eol.

                $eol.$url['query'];

    $fp = fsockopen($url['host'], $url['port'], $errno, $errstr, 30); 

    if($fp) {

      fputs($fp, $headers);

      $result = '';

      while(!feof($fp)) { $result .= fgets($fp, 128); }

      fclose($fp);

      if (!$headers) {

        //removes headers

        $pattern="/^.*\r\n\r\n/s";

        $result=preg_replace($pattern,'',$result);

      }

      return $result;

    }

}

?>

francois hill
03-Dec-2007 10:56


Seems file looks for the file inside the current working (executing) directory before looking in the include path, even with the FILE_USE_INCLUDE_PATH flag specified.



Same behavior as include actually.



By the way I feel the doc is not entirely clear on the exact order of inclusion (see include). It seems to say the include_path is the first location to be searched, but I have come across at least one case where the directory containing the file including was actually the first to be searched.



Drat.

bearachute at gmail dot com
11-Jul-2007 04:38


If you're having problems with binary and hex data:



I had a problem when trying to read information from a ttf, which is primarily hex data. A binary-safe file read automatically replaces byte values with their corresponding ASCII characters, so I thought that I could use the binary string when I needed readable ASCII strings, and bin2hex() when I needed hex strings.



However, this became a problem when I tried to pass those ASCII strings into other functions (namely gd functions). var_dump showed that a 5-character string contained 10 characters, but they weren't visible. A binary-to-"normal" string conversion function didn't seem to exist and I didn't want to have to convert every single character in hex using chr().



I used unpack with "c*" as the format flag to see what was going on, and found that every other character was null data (ordinal 0). To solve it, I just did



str_replace(chr(0), "", $string);



which did the trick.



This took forever to figure out so I hope this helps people reading from hex data!

tobsn at php dot net
01-May-2007 11:26


you'll find the http response headers in: $http_response_header



;o)

Greg Ambrose (greg at catalina-it dot com dot au)
16-Apr-2007 11:37


[Editors note: As of PHP 5.2.1 you can specify `timeout` context option and pass the context to file_get_contents()]





The only way I could get get_file_contents() to wait for a very slow http request was to set the socket timeout as follows.





 ini_set('default_socket_timeout',    120);    


$a = file_get_contents("http://abcxyz.com");





Other times like execution time and input time had no effect.

siegfri3d at gmail dot com
05-Dec-2006 02:52


Use the previous example if you want to request the server for a special part of the content, IF and only if the server accepts the method.

If you want a simple example to ask the server for all the content, but only save a portion of it, do it this way:

<?

$content=file_get_contents("http://www.google.com",FALSE,NULL,0,20);

echo $content;

?>



This will echo the 20 first bytes of the google.com source code.

fcicqbbs at gmail dot com
04-Aug-2006 03:55


the bug #36857 was fixed.

http://bugs.php.net/36857



Now you may use this code,to fetch the partial content like this:

<?php

$context=array('http' => array ('header'=> 'Range: bytes=1024-', ),);

$xcontext = stream_context_create($context);

$str=file_get_contents("http://www.fcicq.net/wp/",FALSE,$xcontext);

?>

that's all.

richard dot quadling at bandvulc dot co dot uk
15-Nov-2005 04:47


If, like me, you are on a Microsoft network with ISA server and require NTLM authentication, certain applications will not get out of the network. SETI@Home Classic and PHP are just 2 of them.



The workaround is fairly simple.



First you need to use an NTLM Authentication Proxy Server. There is one written in Python and is available from http://apserver.sourceforge.net/. You will need Python from http://www.python.org/.



Both sites include excellent documentation.



Python works a bit like PHP. Human readable code is handled without having to produce a compiled version. You DO have the opportunity of compiling the code (from a .py file to a .pyc file).



Once compiled, I installed this as a service (instsrv and srvany - parts of the Windows Resource Kit), so when the server is turned on (not logged in), the Python based NTLM Authentication Proxy Server is running.



Then, and here is the bit I'm really interested in, you need to tell PHP you intend to route http/ftp requests through the NTLM APS.



To do this, you use contexts.



Here is an example.



<?php



// Define a context for HTTP.

$aContext = array(

    'http' => array(

        'proxy' => 'tcp://127.0.0.1:8080', // This needs to be the server and the port of the NTLM Authentication Proxy Server.

        'request_fulluri' => True,

        ),

    );

$cxContext = stream_context_create($aContext);



// Now all file stream functions can use this context.



$sFile = file_get_contents("http://www.php.net", False, $cxContext);



echo $sFile;

?>



Hopefully this helps SOMEONE!!!

aidan at php dot net
31-Jan-2005 01:23


This functionality is now implemented in the PEAR package PHP_Compat.



More information about using this function without upgrading your version of PHP can be found on the below link:



http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_Compat

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file_put_contents

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