What is the purpose or use case for needing to treat an existing file on the server as if it were uploaded via a form in PHP?

When working with files on a server in PHP, there may be cases where you need to treat an existing file as if it were uploaded via a form. This could be useful for scenarios where you want to process the file using functions that are typically used for uploaded files, such as moving, renaming, or validating the file. To achieve this, you can create a new instance of the `UploadedFile` class from the existing file path. This allows you to access the file properties and methods as if it were uploaded via a form. 

// Existing file path
$filePath = 'path/to/existing/file.txt';

// Create a new UploadedFile instance
$uploadedFile = new UploadedFile($filePath, basename($filePath), mime_content_type($filePath), filesize($filePath), null, true);

// Now you can treat $uploadedFile as if it were uploaded via a form
// For example, you can move the file to a new location
$uploadedFile->moveTo('new/path/file.txt');

Keywords

file handling server-side form submission PHP file upload

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