working with the php://stdin I/O streams

Question

I know the way to open and read the content of the file with the fopen function like this:

@fopen("inputfile.txt", "r");

But with the php://stdin i got bit confused

$in = fopen('php://stdin', 'r');

Where should i specify the name of txt file that i attempt to read?

Maybe you don't understand what standard input is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… — Jonathon Reinhart
– Jonathon Reinhart, Commented Jan 7, 2012 at 22:27

mario · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-07 22:24:10Z

php://stdin is for CLI usage. You do not specify a filename directly in PHP then. It is typically utilized from the terminal like this:

echo "input text" | php script.php

or

cat textinput.txt | php do-something.php

Where the thing you pipe into the interpreter is what you receive when reading from stdin.

Btw, you can also just use the STDIN constant, without manually calling fopen first.

What should i do if i want to read a txt file then, please, i want an example showing the use of that.
For reading a file, see my second example. You do not specify the file in your PHP script, but leave that to users and the shell. That's the whole point of STDIN, to allow for input from unknown sources. -- I guess Wikipedia for once explains the concept better than I ever could: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_streams

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