including leading whitespaces when using fgets in php - php

Question

I am using PHP to read a simple text file with the fgets() command:
$file = fopen("filename.txt", "r") or exit('oops');
$data = "";
while(!feof($file)) {
$data .= fgets($file) . '<br>';
}
fclose($file);
The text file has leading white spaces before the first character of each line. The fgets() is not grabbing the white spaces. Any idea why? I made sure not to use trim() on the variable. I tried this, but the leading white spaces still don't appear:
$data = str_replace(" ", " ", $data);
Not sure where to go from here.
Thanks in advance,
Doug
UPDATE:
The text appears correctly if I dump it into a textarea but not if I ECHO it to the webpage.

Answer 1

Function fgets() grabs the whitespaces. I don't know what you are exactly doing with the $data variable, but if you simply display it on a HTML page then you won't see whitespaces. It's because HTML strips all whitespaces. Try this code to read and show your file content:
$file = fopen('file.txt', 'r') or exit('error');
$data = '';
while(!feof($file))
{
$data .= '<pre>' . fgets($file) . '</pre><br>';
}
fclose($file);
echo $data;
The PRE tag allows you to display $data without parsing it.

Answer 2

Try it with:
$data = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $data);
fgets should not trim whitespaces.

Answer 3

Try to read the file using file_get_contents it is successfully reading the whitespace in the begining of the file.
$data = file_get_contents("xyz.txt");
$data = str_replace(" ","~",$data);
echo $data;
Hope this helps

Answer 4

I currently have the same requirement and experienced that some characters are written as a tab character.
What i did was:
$tabChar = ' ';
$regularChar = ' '
$file = fopen('/file.txt');
while($line = fgets($file)) {
$l = str_replace("\t", $tabChar, $line);
$l = str_replace(" ", $regularChar, $line);
// ...
// replacing can be done till it matches your needs
$lines .= $l; // maybe append <br /> if neccessary
}
$result = '<pre'> . $lines . '</pre>';
This one worked for me, maybe it helps you too :-).