On Saturday 11 January 2003 10:47 pm, Marco Tabini wrote:
> You don't specify if you want to read a *particular* line from a file.
> If so, I think there really is no way short of scanning the file with
> fgets() or by perhaps using some external utility such as grep or sed.
scanning the file with fgets is very slow. using external tools which
are specialized for the task of scanning for lines will generally
yield much better results.
if you're on unix, then a combination of head and tail (or just head
or tail, if you just want the first or last line of a file) will generally get
you any line. e.g., if you want the 5th line of a file, you can say:
cat filename | head -n 5 | tail -n 1
(use popen to start that process running and read its output).
on the other hand, if you don't know just which line number it is
you want, then some more complicated method (probably involving
grep, as suggested by Marco) will generally get you what you
need. if what you need is even more complex than this, then you
will probably just have to scan the file with fgets although it
might still be possible with a combination of unix command line
tools such as head, tail, grep, etc).
if you're on windows and don't have access to those tools, well,
you're on your own. you would probably be able to get better
performance by writing the program to get the line in C/C++
or some other compiled language and just popen that from
php.
tiger
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