Using PHP fgetc() to Read Characters from Files and Standard Input

PHP provides many file‑handling functions, and fgetc() is one that reads a single character from an opened file and moves the file pointer to the next character.

Before using fgetc() , you must open the file with fopen() . The following example shows how to open a file for reading:

$file = fopen("example.txt", "r");
if ($file) {
    // File opened successfully
    // Perform other file operations
} else {
    // File failed to open
    echo "Unable to open file!";
}

After successfully opening the file, you can call fgetc() to read one character at a time. The syntax is simple:

fgetc($file)

Here $file is the resource pointer returned by fopen() . The following code reads the entire file character by character and echoes each character until the end of the file is reached:

$file = fopen("example.txt", "r");
if ($file) {
    while (($char = fgetc($file)) !== false) {
        echo $char;
    }
    fclose($file);
} else {
    echo "Unable to open file!";
}

The while loop continues as long as fgetc() returns a character; when it returns false , the loop ends, indicating that all characters have been read.

In addition to reading from files, fgetc() can read a single character from user input via STDIN . The example below prompts the user, reads the input character, and uses a switch statement to respond accordingly:

echo "Please enter a character: ";
$input = fgetc(STDIN);

switch ($input) {
    case 'a':
        echo "You entered the letter a";
        break;
    case 'b':
        echo "You entered the letter b";
        break;
    case 'c':
        echo "You entered the letter c";
        break;
    default:
        echo "Invalid character entered";
}

This demonstrates that fgetc() is useful both for file content processing and for interactive character input in PHP scripts.