How to read only 5 last line of the text file in PHP?

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For a large file, reading all the lines into an array with file() is a bit wasteful. Here’s how you could read the file and maintain a buffer of the last 5 lines:

$lines=array();
$fp = fopen("file.txt", "r");
while(!feof($fp))
{
   $line = fgets($fp, 4096);
   array_push($lines, $line);
   if (count($lines)>5)
       array_shift($lines);
}
fclose($fp);

You could optimize this a bit more with some heuristics about likely line length by seeking to a position, say, approx 10 lines from the end, and going further back if that doesn’t yield 5 lines. Here’s a simple implementation which demonstrates that:

//how many lines?
$linecount=5;

//what's a typical line length?
$length=40;

//which file?
$file="test.txt";

//we double the offset factor on each iteration
//if our first guess at the file offset doesn't
//yield $linecount lines
$offset_factor=1;


$bytes=filesize($file);

$fp = fopen($file, "r") or die("Can't open $file");


$complete=false;
while (!$complete)
{
    //seek to a position close to end of file
    $offset = $linecount * $length * $offset_factor;
    fseek($fp, -$offset, SEEK_END);


    //we might seek mid-line, so read partial line
    //if our offset means we're reading the whole file, 
    //we don't skip...
    if ($offset<$bytes)
        fgets($fp);

    //read all following lines, store last x
    $lines=array();
    while(!feof($fp))
    {
        $line = fgets($fp);
        array_push($lines, $line);
        if (count($lines)>$linecount)
        {
            array_shift($lines);
            $complete=true;
        }
    }

    //if we read the whole file, we're done, even if we
    //don't have enough lines
    if ($offset>=$bytes)
        $complete=true;
    else
        $offset_factor*=2; //otherwise let's seek even further back

}
fclose($fp);

var_dump($lines);

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