Question

How can I have php return just some bytes of a file? Like, it I wanted to load byte 7 through 15 into a string, without reading any other part of the file? Its important that I don’t need to load all of the file into memory, as the file could be quite large.

Answer 1

Use fseek() and fread()

$fp = fopen('somefile.txt', 'r');

// move to the 7th byte
fseek($fp, 7);

$data = fread($fp, 8);   // read 8 bytes from byte 7

fclose($fp);