In this tutorial I'm going to show how to read back information from files. So before we can read information from a file we need to use a function fopen just to open the file for reading. In this lesson, we’re going to use the “hello.txt” file that we created in the writing of file lesson. To start in this lesson, we are going to create a new PHP file called "readfile.php".

If you have remembered in one of our lesson the writing of the file, we talked about the idea of the file pointer or its like a cursor in a word processor. So in file handling we have the ability to move the pointer around the file to write in different places within the file.

Introduction: This tutorial will is going to be on how to create a task management system in PHP... it's going to be a long one! Pre-creation: First you will need a host for your PHP, either a web host or localhost is fine but you will need PHP and MySQL(i) capabilities. Database: We are going to be storing all of the created tasks in a database named 'tasksTutorial', and in there a table named 'tasks'. Let's create these now; Go to PHPMyAdmin and enter 'tasksTutorial' followed by pressing the 'create' button.