Question

I have a page at URL http://site.com/params. I want to read only the first n characters from this remote page. Functions like readfile(), file_get_contents() and curl seem to download whole of the pages. Can’t figure out how to do this in PHP.

Please help…!

Answer 1

file_get_contents() may be what you’re looking for if the maxlen parameter is utilized. By default, this function:

//Reads entire file into a string
$wholePage= file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/');

However, the maxlen parameter is the maximum length of data read.

// Read 14 characters starting from the 1st character
$section = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/', NULL, NULL, 0, 14);

This implies that the entire file is not read, and only maxlen characters are read, if maxlen is defined.