What is fread in PHP?
PHP offers many functions for file manipulation. The fread function in PHP reads the content from an already open file. It is a binary-safe read option that allows binary data in addition to normal text content to be read.
Syntax
The syntax for fread function is shown below:
fread(resource $stream, int $length): string|false
Parameters
The fread function has two parameters:
file: This is a required parameter. This is the pointer of the file stream that points to a file that is already open. Thefreadfunction stops reading from the file at the end of the file or when it reaches the specifiedlength number of bytes length: This is also a required parameter. This parameter specifies the number of bytes to be read from the file.
Return value
The fread() function returns the read content from the file in the form of a string.
If it is unable to return the content due to an error or by coming to the end of the file, it returns false.
Code
The following code shows how we can use the fread function.
main.php
test.txt
<?php$file = fopen("test.txt","r"); // open the filewhile(!feof($file)) //checks if at end of the file{echo fread($file, 32); //reads the content of 32 bytes from the file}fclose($file); // close the file?>
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