I have created a program to import a text file. I has been working fine until the source file got bigger then 3mb. Does fopen($file_name, "r") command have a limit to the size of the file that can be openned?

PHP Code:

// accepts file name
if (isset($_REQUEST['filename']))  $file_name = $_REQUEST['filename'];
else         die('No filename provided...');
// Open file in read mode
$file = @fopen($file_name, "r") or exit("Unable to open file!");
if ($file) {
    $sLBL = fgets($file);
    $project = project($sLBL);  //Isolates project number from first row of text in file 


I don't know if fopen has size limit, but PHP does have limited allocated RAM limit and execution time limit. They can be changed within the script:

set_time_limit(300);
ini_set('memory_limit', '1024M');

fopen() does not have any limits on size of the file being opened. Most probably the problem is with your project() function. Please tell us exact errors and symptoms of "not working".

The error message that I am getting is

"Unable to open file!"

The file is 2.56 MB and is a text file data dump from SAP.

It has been working on smaller files fine. I reduced the file size of the data file by reducing the amount of data that is dumped from SAP so that a 764K file was created, and that works fine.

I have attached both the parsing function and a sample of the text file. It will not work on your system without modification as you do not have the db but you can have a look to see if you have any suggestions.

okay, so first, add this to the beginning of the php script:

PHP Code:

error_level(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1); 


Re try your script, and tell us what exactly is the fopen() error, not the message you determined with an "or die()" condition.

Fopen() does not parse the file, it only gives back a pointer to iterate through the file. So it cannot be the size that causes the problem.
I'd rather think that the file was uploaded via ftp or via the network, and it's permissions are not low enough to allow the user that run the web server(usually nobody, or apache) to read the file.

Please ensure that your file is readable by everyone ("chmod 555 yourfile.txt" from a shell in the same directory as your file), it may be your problem.

For example, if a file is not found, fopen() should yield, given the following code:

PHP Code:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
$h=fopen('lalal','r'); 


Warning: fopen(lalal): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/tmo/2.php

If the file is not readable:

Warning: fopen(lalal): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/tmo/2.php on line 3