What is the purpose of using the join() function in PHP to read a file?

When reading a file in PHP, the `join()` function can be used to concatenate the lines of the file into a single string. This can be useful when you want to process the contents of the file as a single entity, rather than line by line.

<?php
// Open the file for reading
$file = fopen("example.txt", "r");

// Read the file line by line and join the lines into a single string
$fileContents = join("", file($file));

// Close the file
fclose($file);

// Output the contents of the file as a single string
echo $fileContents;
?>