How to read a file in PHP?

Introduction:
PHP provides multiple methods to read a file’s contents. The most common is file_get_contents() for reading the entire file into a string or fopen() with a loop for larger files.

Example:

<?php
$filename = "example.txt";

if (file_exists($filename)) {
    $contents = file_get_contents($filename);
    echo "File contents: <br>" . nl2br($contents);
} else {
    echo "File does not exist.";
}
?>

Explanation:

• file_exists($filename) checks if the file exists to prevent errors.
• file_get_contents($filename) reads the entire file into a string.
• nl2br($contents) converts newlines (\n) in the file into HTML <br> tags for proper display.