file()

[meltingpoint]

Two questions.

1-  At what size of a file does it become too cumbersome to uses file() as opposed to something like opening a file and then while !feof etc....?  5mb?  10mb?

 

2- Does file() open and close automatically?  No need for fopen or fclose.

 

Tks

[Garethp]

For answer to number 2, just look at the example in php.net

 

http://au2.php.net/manual/en/function.file.php

 

No, it does not

[Zyx]

Question one: of course it is much slower. PHP must split the file content into lines and pack it to arrays, and this takes some time. With feof() and fread() you simply read the file, you can process it on the fly or do something else with it. I remember a topic on one discussion group long ago - the guy complained about "very slow XML processing". He had a 10 MB file and tried to parse it with PHP, which took several minutes. He provided the source code and the next person noticed that he loads everything with file(), and then concatenates the whole array back to a string. After replacing this code with fopen() and fread(), the script became much faster and processed the same XML file in 2 seconds .

 

You should avoid using file() unless you absolutely need the functionality it provides, especially for bigger files.

[meltingpoint]

Thanks guys.  That helps a lot.

 

Cheers.

 

Meltingpoint