Reading in a file for one line

[Anon]

I've got a file I need to read in and get the fifth line of and set to some variable. My perl friend gave me this snippet of code (usually his examples in perl are pretty close to the mark in php) but after reading fopen and popen on php.net, I'm still unclear of how I would do this.

open(STYLEFILE, $siteroot . "/styles");
my $sitestyle = <STYLEFILE>;
my $sitetype = <STYLEFILE>;
my $siteset = <STYLEFILE>;
my $sitesize = <STYLEFILE>;
my $sitestuff= <STYLEFILE>;
close(STYLEFILE);

was his example.

I need to open ../styles, and parse it for line 5 which reads

sitestuff=4 (or some number)

from certain pages in the project I am working on, so I know what "sitestuff" to give them. I know how to use fopen to append to files, how to read in a single line..but I'm just not making the intuitive leap to reading in 4 lines I do nothing with just to get line 5.

any help appreciated.

[kparker]

The useage

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;x = &ltFILEHANDLE&gt;

in perl returns the next line from the file associated with FILEHANDLE.

For PHP, I can think of two ways:

(1) If the file is short, just use

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$data = file("file.txt");

which reads the whole thing into an array, (one line per element) then access the line you want bay saying $data[4].

(2) If the file is large, you may get better performance by just reading line-by-line in a loop and quitting after you read 5 lines.

[Anon]

#1 worked like a charm.

It's amazingly frustrating how simple some of this stuff ends up being and how much sense it makes when people post examples, when it's been stumping me for hours. sighs Some day, I guess, I'll get there.

Thank you for your help.