remove All lines except first 20 using php - php

Question

how to remove every line except the first 20 using php from a text file?

Answer 1

If loading the entire file in memory is feasible you can do:
// read the file in an array.
$file = file($filename);
// slice first 20 elements.
$file = array_slice($file,0,20);
// write back to file after joining.
file_put_contents($filename,implode("",$file));
A better solution would be to use the function ftruncate which takes the file handle and the new size of the file in bytes as follows:
// open the file in read-write mode.
$handle = fopen($filename, 'r+');
if(!$handle) {
// die here.
}
// new length of the file.
$length = 0;
// line count.
$count = 0;
// read line by line.
while (($buffer = fgets($handle)) !== false) {
// increment line count.
++$count;
// if count exceeds limit..break.
if($count > 20) {
break;
}
// add the current line length to final length.
$length += strlen($buffer);
}
// truncate the file to new file length.
ftruncate($handle, $length);
// close the file.
fclose($handle);

Answer 2

For a memory efficient solution you can use
$file = new SplFileObject('/path/to/file.txt', 'a+');
$file->seek(19); // zero-based, hence 19 is line 20
$file->ftruncate($file->ftell());

Answer 3

Apologies, mis-read the question...
$filename = "blah.txt";
$lines = file($filename);
$data = "";
for ($i = 0; $i < 20; $i++) {
$data .= $lines[$i] . PHP_EOL;
}
file_put_contents($filename, $data);

Answer 4

Something like:
$lines_array = file("yourFile.txt");
$new_output = "";
for ($i=0; $i<20; $i++){
$new_output .= $lines_array[$i];
}
file_put_contents("yourFile.txt", $new_output);

Answer 5

This should work as well without huge memory usage
$result = '';
$file = fopen('/path/to/file.txt', 'r');
for ($i = 0; $i < 20; $i++)
{
$result .= fgets($file);
}
fclose($file);
file_put_contents('/path/to/file.txt', $result);