PHP Tips: How to Read Remote Text File and Download to Local

Who still use PHP? Raise your hand! Hahaha. OK, because of self-explanatory title, here is how to do it. We will use several functions on PHP for this purpose, such as fopen, feof, fgets, fwrite and fclose functions. Yes, that's lower level functions.

Scenario

Suppose we have remote text file stored on a website, let's called it

https://bolabanget.id/myfile.json

We want to create a PHP script that download that file (myfile.json) to our local computer with name (myfile.local.json).

Here is the script.

The Code

File: download_file.php

<?php
// open the source file with read-only mode
$source = fopen('https://bolabanget.id/myfile.json', "r") or die("Unable to open file!");
// prepare local file with write mode (if not exists it will try to create one)
$target = fopen('myfile.local.json', 'w') or die("Unable to open file");

// prepare variable for content of the source file
$content = '';

// tests for end-of-file on a source file pointer
while(!feof($source)) {
  // fgets will get line from file pointer
  $content .= fgets($source);
}

// write the $content variable to target file handle
fwrite($target, $content);

// close all open files from our operation above
fclose($source);
fclose($target);

Run it like below.

php download_file.php

If everything OK, you should have file myfile.local.json on your current folder.

Alternative Code

@hepisec comes with additional alternative on comments, we can do above task as well with the following code. This code using higher level functions such as file_get_contents and file_put_contents. Thank you!

<?php
$src = file_get_contents('https://bolabanget.id/myfile.json');
file_put_contents('myfile.local.json', $src);

I hope you enjoy it and any additional code or comments are welcome.

Credits

• PHP Documentation at https://www.php.net/manual/en/
• Cover photo by Christina Morillo at https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-women-looking-at-the-code-at-laptop-1181263/
• Thanks to @hepisec for the additional code