file_get_contents or alternative to extract the first x lines

Question

I would like to extract the first x lines of an html page I know that I can extract the amount of characters with something like this:

file_get_contents('http://xx.xxx.158.239/fin.html' , NULL, NULL, 0, 125);

but what about lines ? like to extract the text from line 1 to line 4? is that possible ?

What constitutes a new line in your use case? An actual line break in the file, html line break tags in the code or something else? — miknik, Oct 17 '17 at 20:27
Got an example snip from a file you will be trying in the right format? fopen and reading by line will work if its a standard newline format. — IncredibleHat, Oct 17 '17 at 20:29
Possible duplicate of [How to read a file line by line in php](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13246597/how-to-read-a-file-line-by-line-in-php) — Sebastian Brosch, Oct 17 '17 at 20:32

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '17 at 20:30

You can read the file using dedicated method calls instead of the one-for-all file_get_contents():

$fp = fopen('my/file/name', 'r');
for ($i = 0; $i < 4; $i++) {
    if (feof($fp)) {
        echo 'EOF reached';
        break;
    }
    echo fgets($fp);
}
fclose($fp);

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 17 '17 at 22:24

Here's a little code snippet that you might find useful:

$file = 'http://xx.xxx.158.239/fin.html';  // remote or local file
$lines = 3; // how many lines do you want?
if (file_exists($file)) {
    $contents = @file_get_contents($file); // suppress errors, esp. for remote files
    $head = implode("\n", array_slice(explode("\n", $contents), 0, $lines));
} else {
    $head = 'File does not exist';
}
echo $head;

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 17 '17 at 20:33

0

You can use file on a File- or URL-Handle created by fopen to load the content into an array and read only the relevant lines.

To get the content line by line in a loop, you can use fgets.

answered Oct 17 '17 at 20:33

blaimi

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file_get_contents or alternative to extract the first x lines

3 Answers3