Reading file PHP using too much memory - php

Question

So, I'm trying to parse a text file that has 24MB and 314134 lines. The problem is, I feel like my script is using way too much memory.
This is the code:
if(file_exists($filePath)) {
$data = file_get_contents($filePath);
$lines = explode("\n", $data);
foreach ($lines as $line) {
//Split the line.
$spllitedLine = explode(';', utf8_encode($line));
//Get the fields by their index.
$localidade = !empty($spllitedLine[3]) ? $spllitedLine[3] : '';
$codigo_postal = $spllitedLine[14] . '-' . $spllitedLine[15];
$morada = (!empty($spllitedLine[5]) ? $spllitedLine[5] : ' ') . ' ' .
(!empty($spllitedLine[6]) ? $spllitedLine[6] : ' ') . ' ' .
(!empty($spllitedLine[7]) ? $spllitedLine[7] : ' ') . ' ' .
(!empty($spllitedLine[8]) ? $spllitedLine[8] : ' ') . ' ' .
(!empty($spllitedLine[9]) ? $spllitedLine[9] : '');
//Create a new CTT location and save it to the Database.
$location = new CttLocations();
$location->address = preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $morada);
$location->location = $localidade;
$location->zipcode = $codigo_postal;
$location->save(false);
//Unset the variables to free space.
unset($location);
unset($line);
unset($morada);
}
}
This is currently using 153MB of memory and it's not even in the half of the file. I've read that using fopen() fgets() and fclose() it's a better solution but I was using roughly the same amount of memory with those methods. What am I doing wrong? I thought by unsetting the variables I would free some much needed space. I think 150MB is WAY too much for an operation like this. Any thouhgts?

Answer 1

This :
$data = file_get_contents($filePath);
Is way to heavy for big files.
This is how you read a file line by line :
$handle = fopen("inputfile.txt", "r");
if ($handle) {
while (($line = fgets($handle)) !== false) {
// process the line read.
}
fclose($handle);
} else {
// error opening the file.
}