In what situations is it recommended to use alternative methods, like reading files line by line, instead of including them in PHP scripts?

When dealing with large files or files with a significant amount of data, it is recommended to use alternative methods like reading files line by line instead of including them directly in PHP scripts. This approach helps to prevent memory overflow issues and improves the performance of the script by processing the file data incrementally. 

$filename = 'large_file.txt';

$handle = fopen($filename, 'r');

if ($handle) {
    while (($line = fgets($handle)) !== false) {
        // Process each line of the file here
    }

    fclose($handle);
} else {
    echo "Error opening the file.";
}

Keywords

file handling performance memory usage large files scalability

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