How can one efficiently read only the first 200 characters of a file in PHP?

To efficiently read only the first 200 characters of a file in PHP, you can use the `fread()` function to read a specific number of bytes from the file. You can open the file using `fopen()`, read the first 200 characters using `fread()`, and then close the file using `fclose()`.

$file = fopen("example.txt", "r");
if ($file) {
    $content = fread($file, 200);
    fclose($file);
    echo $content;
} else {
    echo "Unable to open file.";
}