What are the best practices for reading and processing files line by line in PHP, as opposed to loading the entire file into memory?

When dealing with large files, it is best practice to read and process them line by line in PHP to avoid loading the entire file into memory, which can lead to performance issues and memory exhaustion. One way to achieve this is by using a while loop to read the file line by line until the end is reached. 

$filename = 'example.txt';
$handle = fopen($filename, 'r');

if ($handle) {
    while (($line = fgets($handle)) !== false) {
        // Process each line here
        echo $line;
    }

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

Keywords

file handling fgets memory management performance optimization large files

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