how do you read the last line in php and parse out certain columns

Question

I am very new to php. I\'d really appreciate all the help here.

I am using sftp to login to a server and get a file. I am only interested in the last line in that file.

Answer 1

Last line

Might be overkill if the file is small, but wrote this function a while ago. Returns the last n lines of a file/stream.

function tail($file, $lines = 10, $buffer = 4096)
{
        if(is_resource($file) && (get_resource_type($file) == 'file' || get_resource_type($file) == 'stream'))
                $f = $file;
        elseif(is_string($file))
                $f = fopen($file, 'rb');
        else
                throw new Exception('$file must be either a resource (file or stream) or a filename.');

        $output = ''; 
        $chunk = '';

        fseek($f, -1, SEEK_END);

        if(fread($f, 1) != "\n")
                $lines -= 1;

        while(ftell($f) > 0 && $lines >= 0)
        {
                $seek = min(ftell($f), $buffer);
                fseek($f, -$seek, SEEK_CUR);

                $output = ($chunk = fread($f, $seek)).$output;
                fseek($f, -mb_strlen($chunk, '8bit'), SEEK_CUR);
                $lines -= substr_count($chunk, "\n");
        }

        while($lines++ < 0)
                $output = substr($output, strpos($output, "\n")+1);

        fclose($f); 
        return $output; 
}

Columns

If tab separated, simply do a split and assign what you want to variables.

$columns = explode("\t",$line);

$foo = $columns[15];
...