How do I read the first n lines of a file in PHP?

that's it! thanks!

Is there a special reason you need to only get the first n lines? If you are worried about running into files that are 200 megs or something, I think uncleozzy has the only approach. But typically I'd just grab the whole file.

Nevermind............

Yeah, I would assume that once you issue an input command, the operating system takes over. I don't think you have PHP control over the data as it's being read. So you just have to issue a give-me-the-whole thing or a give-me-this-much command. If you want to be able to read in little bits of data, a database might be a better option. It's pretty easy to hook up MYSQL and PHP.

pissfactory, try substr($file, 0, strripos($file, "----------"));

riffola: You'll want to surround the dashes by \ns. But even that won't help, as apparantly strripos finds the last match instead of the first, and though it wasn't said explicity I'm assuming pissfactory wants the first.

I don't know PHP, but regexp knows no borders: (.*?)(?:\n|^)-{10}(?:\n|$) That also accounts for the possibility that it occurs on the first or last line (which, being that it seems like a divider, is probably irrelevent). Then count the occurences of \n in the first (only) submatch, plus one. And you can easily specify the number of dashes, too, which is of extremely mild advantage. You can do the same thing as riffola's does according to fvw - make it match the last one - by removing the first question mark.

$lines = @file($fileName); for ($i = 0; $lines[$i] != '----------'; $i++) echo $lines[$i];