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fscanf

(PHP 4 >= 4.0.1, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

fscanf — Parses input from a file according to a format

Description

fscanf(resource $stream, string $format, mixed &...$vars): array|int|false|null

The function fscanf() is similar to sscanf(), but it takes its input from a file associated with stream and interprets the input according to the specified format.

Any whitespace in the format string matches any whitespace in the input stream. This means that even a tab (\t) in the format string can match a single space character in the input stream.

Each call to fscanf() reads one line from the file.

Parameters

stream

A file system pointer resource that is typically created using fopen().

format

The interpreted format for string, which is described in the documentation for sprintf() with following differences:

  • Function is not locale-aware.
  • F, g, G and b are not supported.
  • D stands for decimal number.
  • i stands for integer with base detection.
  • n stands for number of characters processed so far.
  • s stops reading at any whitespace character.
  • * instead of argnum$ suppresses the assignment of this conversion specification.

vars

The optional assigned values.

Return Values

If only two parameters were passed to this function, the values parsed will be returned as an array. Otherwise, if optional parameters are passed, the function will return the number of assigned values. The optional parameters must be passed by reference.

If there are more substrings expected in the format than there are available within string, null will be returned. On other errors, false will be returned.

Examples

Example #1 fscanf() Example

<?php
$handle = fopen("users.txt", "r");
while ($userinfo = fscanf($handle, "%s\t%s\t%s\n")) {
list ($name, $profession, $countrycode) = $userinfo;
//... do something with the values
}
fclose($handle);
?>

Example #2 Contents of users.txt

javier  argonaut        pe
hiroshi sculptor        jp
robert  slacker us
luigi   florist it

See Also