How can I copy a file content into a temporary file in PHP?

Question

I tried this:

$temp = tmpfile();
file_put_contents($temp,file_get_contents("$path/$filename"));

But I get this error: "Warning: file_put_contents() expects parameter 1 to be string,"

If I try:

echo file_get_contents("$path/$filename");

It return to screen the file content as a long string. Where am I wrong?

Answer 1

In the example you give you want tempnam() and not tmpfile().

• tempnam() creates a temporary file and returns the path to it as a String. You can then pass that string into file_put_contents. You must remember to manually delete the temporary file once you are done with it.

• tmpfile() creates a temporary file and returns a file resource/pointer to use with fwrite() and other file manipulation functions. In addition, once the script execution ends, the temporary file created by tmpfile() is automatically deleted.

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Here is your example script using tempnam() instead of tmpfile():

$temp = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), 'TMP_');

file_put_contents($temp, file_get_contents("$path/$filename"));