First line in file();

[lucianoes]

I have a lot of include files. Some of them can be pretty large. I often need to retrieve their first line only, and for that I am using:

$file = file("somefile.inc", "r");
$firstline = $file [0];
print "$firstline";

It works fine, but it obviously parses and loads the entire file to the $file array and sometimes I only need the first line.

Is there some way I can tell PHP to read the first line only, without even parsing the rest of the file, so as to save some processing power?

Thank you,
Luciano ES
Santos, SP - Brasil

[Anon]

look at fopen() and fread() instead.

[lucianoes]

Thanks, but I had checked these two functions before and can't see how I could use them. fopen() also seems to load the entire file, like file(), and with fread() I can set a limit based on the number of bytes, not lines. I cannot predict the size of the lines. Can you enlighten me, please?

Luciano ES
Santos, SP - Brasil