read textfile with delimiter in php

Question

I have three eintries in a textfile.txt:

20100220
Hello
Here is Text \n blah \t even | and & and so on...

I want to read each entrie (line) as a new string in php. I thought of using fopen and fgets. But: Since I'm using special characters like \n in the last line, fgets() would not work because it will terminate the string at \n, right? In a result the last line would be just 'Here is Text '.

How can I read/explode the three lines the right way, so the \n in the last line would be interpreted as a normal string? Thanks!

p.s. By having three lines in my textfile.txt I indirect chose \n as a delimiter, but I could also use another delimiter. what is just the best way to read the content?

Answer 1

Use file(), that will automatically give you an line-by-line array:

$rows = file('textfile.txt');

And even if you use fgets and such, you should be able to explode properly with "\n" as it is treated differently than literal '\n'.

Answer 2

You have two options:

1.- Use file() to get an array with an element for each line (separated by '\n')

$lines_of_file = file("myfile.txt");
//Now $lines_of_file have an array item per each line

2.- Use file_get_contents() to get a single string you can then split by any separator you want

$file_content = file_get_contents("myfile.txt");
$file_content_separated_by_spaces = explode(" ", $file_content);