How Can I Read Large Files Line by Line to Avoid Memory Exhaustion?

Reading Large Files Line by Line without Memory Exhaustion

When dealing with massive files that exceed memory capacity, it becomes crucial to avoid loading them entirely into memory, as this can lead to out-of-memory errors. One effective approach to efficiently process such files is to read them line by line.

To achieve this, one can leverage the fgets() function. This function retrieves a single line from a file stream and returns it as a string. By employing a loop that calls fgets() repeatedly, you can iterate through the entire file, processing each line individually:

$handle = fopen("inputfile.txt", "r");
if ($handle) {
    while (($line = fgets($handle)) !== false) {
        // Perform necessary actions on the retrieved line.
    }

    fclose($handle);
}

In this code snippet, an attempt is made to open the "inputfile.txt" file in read-only mode. If the file can be opened successfully, a loop is initiated to read the file line by line. The line variable stores the contents of each line read. This loop continues until there are no more lines to read, reaching the end of the file.

The above is the detailed content of How Can I Read Large Files Line by Line to Avoid Memory Exhaustion?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!