fread in PHP

fread — Binary-safe file read
Syntax:

string fread ( resource $handle , int $length )
fread() reads up to length bytes from the file pointer referenced by handle. Reading stops as soon as one of the following conditions is met:

length bytes have been read
EOF (end of file) is reached
a packet becomes available or the socket timeout occurs (for network streams)
if the stream is read buffered and it does not represent a plain file, at most one read of up to a number of bytes equal to the chunk size (usually 8192) is made; depending on the previously buffered data, the size of the returned data may be larger than the chunk size.
Parameters:

handle
A file system pointer resource that is typically created using fopen().

length
Up to length number of bytes read.

Return values: Returns the read string or FALSE on failure.



Example #1 A simple fread() example

<?php
// get contents of a file into a string
$filename = "/usr/local/something.txt";
$handle = fopen($filename, "r");
$contents = fread($handle, filesize($filename));
fclose($handle);
?>
Example #2 Binary fread() example

Warning
On systems which differentiate between binary and text files (i.e. Windows) the file must be opened with 'b' included in fopen() mode parameter.
<?php
$filename = "c:\\files\\somepic.gif";
$handle = fopen($filename, "rb");
$contents = fread($handle, filesize($filename));
fclose($handle);
?>
Example #3 Remote fread() examples

Warning
When reading from anything that is not a regular local file, such as streams returned when reading remote files or from popen() and fsockopen(), reading will stop after a packet is available. This means that you should collect the data together in chunks as shown in the examples below.
<?php
// For PHP 5 and up
$handle = fopen("http://www.example.com/", "rb");
$contents = stream_get_contents($handle);
fclose($handle);
?>
<?php
$handle = fopen("http://www.example.com/", "rb");
$contents = '';
while (!feof($handle)) {
  $contents .= fread($handle, 8192);
}
fclose($handle);
?>


Note:
If you just want to get the contents of a file into a string, use file_get_contents() as it has much better performance than the code above.
Note:
Note that fread() reads from the current position of the file pointer. Use ftell() to find the current position of the pointer and rewind() to rewind the pointer position.