I would strongly consider using a tool like grep
for this. You can call this command line tool from PHP and use it to search the file for the word you are looking for and do things like give you the byte offset of the matching line, give you a matching line plus trailing context lines, etc.
Here is a link to grep manual. http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?grep
Play with the command a bit on the command line to get it the way you want it, then call it from PHP using exec()
, passthru()
, or similar depending on how you need to capture/display the content.
Alternatively, you can simply fopen()
the file with the pointer at the end and move the file pointer forward in the file using fseek()
searching for the string as you move along the way. Once you find you needle, you can then read the file from that offset until you get to the end of file or the number of log entries.
Either of these might be preferable to reading the entire log file into memory and then trying to work with it.
The other thing to consider is whether 1000 characters is meaningful. Typically log files would have lines that vary in length. To me it would seem that you should be more concerned about getting the next X lines from the log file, not the next Y characters. What if a line has 2000 characters, are you saying you only want to get half of it? That may not be meaningful at all.