Function like file() but will read lines X through Y only?

[Sugapablo]

file() works great, until you start looking at file that are very large,
say 134MB.

Is there any function that will return an array for each line of a file,
but only for lines given as parameters?

A function like file("/path/to/file",100,230) which would return lines 100
through 230 as an array.
--
[ Sugapablo ]
[ http://www.sugapablo.net <--personal | http://www.sugapablo.com <--music ]
[ http://www.2ra.org <--political | http://www.subuse.net <--discuss ]

[Bent Stigsen]

Sugapablo wrote:

file() works great, until you start looking at file that are very large,
say 134MB.

Is there any function that will return an array for each line of a file,
but only for lines given as parameters?

A function like file("/path/to/file",100,230) which would return lines 100
through 230 as an array.

Nope. Have to write it yourself.

There is a lot of lazy ways to do it though. PHP (fopen/fgets), piping
from head to tail, sed, awk, grep.

The shortest to write, given your example, is:

sed -n -e 231q -e 100,+130p '/path/to/file'
But not the best choice for performance in all cases. If you only need
to read a small amount of data from the beginning of the file, then use
fopen/fgets in PHP to fetch the lines you need. Even though PHP is slow
compared to the shell-utils, running shellcommands from PHP is costly
enough to sometimes opt for PHP.

If you need to fetch lines from anywhere in the file, then I think grep
would be better. Not sure how head with tail would perfom, or if some
other tool exist.

Those are the lazy ways. If performance is still a problem, then you
need to do other things.
/Bent

[Janwillem Borleffs]

Sugapablo wrote:

file() works great, until you start looking at file that are very
large, say 134MB.

Is there any function that will return an array for each line of a
file, but only for lines given as parameters?

A function like file("/path/to/file",100,230) which would return
lines 100 through 230 as an array.

You could try something like the following, which will not take as many
resources, but isn't really fast either:

<?php

function file_from_offset($file, $start, $end) {
if (!($fp = @fopen($file, "r"))) return false;
$lines = array();
$count = -1;
while (!feof($fp) && (++$count <= $end)) {
$line = fgets($fp, 4096);
if (($count >= $start) && ($count <= $end)) {
$lines[] = $line;
}
}
fclose($fp);
return $lines;
}

print_r(file_from_offset("http://www.google.com/", 10, 13));

?>

JW

[jerry gitomer]

Sugapablo wrote:

file() works great, until you start looking at file that are very large,
say 134MB.

Is there any function that will return an array for each line of a file,
but only for lines given as parameters?

A function like file("/path/to/file",100,230) which would return lines 100
through 230 as an array.

Sugapablo,

Someone else has proposed some code for doing what you want and
mentioned that it won't be very fast.

If performance is a consideration you would be better served
using an RDBMS.

HTH
Jerry

[Chung Leong]

Sugapablo wrote:

file() works great, until you start looking at file that are very large, say 134MB.

Is there any function that will return an array for each line of a file, but only for lines given as parameters?

A function like file("/path/to/file",100,230) which would return lines 100 through 230 as an array.
--
[ Sugapablo ] [ http://www.sugapablo.net <--personal | http://www.sugapablo.com <--music ] [ http://www.2ra.org <--political | http://www.subuse.net

<--discuss ]

Unless each line contains the same number of characters, you can't read
specific lines within the middle of the file without first reading
everything that comes before.

[Bent Stigsen]

jerry gitomer wrote:
[snip]

Sugapablo,

Someone else has proposed some code for doing what you want and
mentioned that it won't be very fast.

[snip]

Yup.

I tried different quick and dirty methods, picking out some lines at
different places from a text file with about a million lines (approx.
25MB). ("h|t" is head on file piped to tail)

+---------+---------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| from | to | PHP | h|t | sed | awk | grep |
+---------+---------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| 5000 | 5200 | 0.023 | 0.350 | 0.330 | 0.366 | 0.400 |
| 305000 | 305200 | 1.604 | 0.537 | 0.992 | 0.623 | 0.444 |
| 605000 | 605200 | 3.171 | 0.677 | 1.679 | 0.985 | 0.537 |
| 905000 | 905200 | 4.705 | 0.835 | 2.373 | 1.290 | 0.606 |
+---------+---------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+

Speedtest is only run once, so not super accurate, but I think
the trend is obvious.
/Bent