fopen

fopen -- open file or URL

Description

int fopen(string filename, string mode);

If filename begins with "http://" (not case sensitive), an HTTP 1.0 connection is opened to the specified server and a file pointer is returned to the beginning of the text of the response.

Does not handle HTTP redirects, so you must include trailing slashes on directories.

If filename begins with "ftp://" (not case sensitive), an ftp connection to the specified server is opened and a pointer to the requested file is returned. If the server does not support passive mode ftp, this will fail. You can open files for either reading and writing via ftp (but not both simultaneously).

If filename begins with anything else, the file will be opened from the filesystem, and a file pointer to the file opened is returned.

If the open fails, the function returns false.

mode may be any of the following:

As well, mode may contain the letter 'b'. This is useful only on systems which differentiate between binary and text files (i.e., it's useless on Unix). If not needed, this will be ignored.

Example 1. fopen() example

$fp = fopen("/home/rasmus/file.txt", "r");
$fp = fopen("http://www.php.net/", "r");
$fp = fopen("ftp://user:password@example.com/", "w");

If you are experiencing problems with reading and writing to files and you're using the server module version of PHP, remember to make sure that the files and directories you're using are accessible to the server process.

On the Windows platform, be careful to escape any backslashes used in the path to the file, or use forward slashes.

$fp = fopen("c:\\data\\info.txt", "r");

See also fclose(), fsockopen(), and popen().