file_put_contents

Description

This function is identical to calling fopen(), fwrite() and fclose() successively to write data to a file.

If filename does not exist, the file is created. Otherwise, the existing file is overwritten, unless the FILE_APPEND flag is set.

Parameters

filename

Path to the file where to write the data.

data

The data to write. Can be either a string, an array or a stream resource.

If data is a stream resource, the remaining buffer of that stream will be copied to the specified file. This is similar with using stream_copy_to_stream().

You can also specify the data parameter as a single dimension array. This is equivalent to file_put_contents($filename, implode('', $array)).

flags

The value of flags can be any combination of the following flags, joined with the binary OR (|) operator.

Flag	Description
FILE_USE_INCLUDE_PATH	Search for filename in the include directory. See include_path for more information.
FILE_APPEND	If file filename already exists, append the data to the file instead of overwriting it.
LOCK_EX	Acquire an exclusive lock on the file while proceeding to the writing. In other words, a flock() call happens between the fopen() call and the fwrite() call. This is not identical to an fopen() call with mode "x".

context

A valid context resource created with stream_context_create().

Return Values

This function returns the number of bytes that were written to the file, or false on failure.

Falseproblem

Examples

Simple usage example

<?php
$file = 'people.txt';
// Open the file to get existing content
$current = file_get_contents($file);
// Append a new person to the file
$current .= "John Smith\n";
// Write the contents back to the file
file_put_contents($file, $current);
?>

Using flags

<?php
$file = 'people.txt';
// The new person to add to the file
$person = "John Smith\n";
// Write the contents to the file, 
// using the FILE_APPEND flag to append the content to the end of the file
// and the LOCK_EX flag to prevent anyone else writing to the file at the same time
file_put_contents($file, $person, FILE_APPEND | LOCK_EX);
?>

Notes Bin-safe Fopen-wrapper

See Also

• fopen()
• fwrite()
• file_get_contents()
• stream_context_create()