How to read a particular line from a text file in PHP

By Saruque Ahamed Mollick

In this tutorial, I am gonna show you how to read a particular line from a text file in PHP. In the previous posts, I have shown you working with a text file in PHP several times, like
Fetching Text Data From a Text File Using PHP
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But this time it is going to be quite interesting as I will show you how to read a specific line from a text file using PHP.

Read a particular line from a text file in PHP

I can put the code snippet only. But as it is CodeSpeedy and we always try to give you the easiest understandable code snippet so I will explain everything step by step with an easy example.

We are here to read a specific line from a text file right?

So let’s create a text file first.

Hello I am from line no 1
Hi I am from line no 2
hello again I am from line no 3
Hey I am from line no 4

Okay, that’s enough for this example text file.

Just save the above lines as a text file. You can put any file name. But in this example, I am saving it as mytextfile.txt

Now just make a PHP file to read the text of a particular line

<?php
$my_text_file = "mytextfile.txt";
$all_lines = file($my_text_file);
echo $all_lines[2];
?>

Output:

hello again I am from line no 3

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Explanation:

Here we have used one PHP inbuilt function that is file().

The file() function actually returns an array. So here $all_lines variable holds the whole text file as an array.
In order to get a particular line, we need to use the array index. Array indexing starts with zero. So if we wish to get the text of line no 3 then we need to use $all_lines[2]

I hope this tutorial is helpful to you.

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One response to “How to read a particular line from a text file in PHP”

1. Rochdi Nassah says:

   June 5, 2021 at 12:49 am

   Thanks for this! It was helpful! Thank you so much!

   Reply