What are some potential pitfalls of using text files for automatic processing in PHP?

One potential pitfall of using text files for automatic processing in PHP is that text files can be prone to formatting errors or inconsistencies, leading to issues with data extraction and manipulation. To mitigate this risk, it is advisable to use a structured data format like JSON or CSV, which can be easily parsed and validated in PHP. 

// Example of parsing a JSON file in PHP
$fileContents = file_get_contents('data.json');
$data = json_decode($fileContents, true);

if($data === null) {
    die("Error parsing JSON file");
}

// Now $data contains the parsed JSON data

Keywords

file handling fopen fwrite fclose error handling

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