When most people think of PHP, they think of how it allows them to connect their websites with databases, manipulate that information and allow their users to benefit from it. What most people don't think of (or perhaps don't know when starting out with PHP), is that it does very well manipulating files too. Reading, opening, closing, writing - there's functions for it all, and the O'Reilly Network has a new article to help those of you out there that are just getting started with file management in PHP.

This new article (from the same guy that has written thier past few ones) starts with the basics of fopen-ing a file, then on to reading a writing to the file pointers you create. Since this is just the first part in the series, it's pretty short, but it gives you a good, very basic start to using files in PHP.

This is one of the things that I love about PHP - it doesn't limit itself to just another "web language" that can't do much outside of a browser. I use it for just about everything these days, including shell scripting - and that wouldn't be possible without things like file support built in. PHP just keeps expanding all the time - and that's a very, very good thing....