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I have a form that sends a text file via POST method in Laravel 4. Inside the Controller, however, I can't figure out how to get its content in order to put it into a BLOB field in the DB.

Laravel's documentation and all the posts I found into the web, always show how to save the content into a file with the ->move() method.

This is my code in the Controller:

$book = Books::find($id);
$file = Input::file('summary'); // get the file user sent via POST
$book->SummaryText = $file->getContent(); <---- this is the method I am searching for...
$book->save(); // save the summary text into the DB

(SummaryText is a MEDIUMTEXT on my DB table).

So, how to get the file content in Laravel 4.1, without having to save it into a file? Is that possible?

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4 Answers 4

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43

If you're posting a text file to than it should already be on the server. As per the laravel documentation, Input::file returns an object that extends the php class SplFileInfo so this should work:

$book->SummaryText = file_get_contents($file->getRealPath());

I'm not sure if the php method file_get_contents will work in the Laravel framework...if it doesn't try this:

$book->SummaryText = File::get($file->getRealPath());
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2 Comments

Yes, file_get_contents() works under Laravel. I chose your first solution. Thank you very much!
getting error "message: "Call to a member function getRealPath() on string", exception: "Error"..."
17

Since Laravel v5.6.30 you can get the file content of an uploaded file like:

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

Route::post('/upload', function (Request $request) {
    $content = $request->file('photo')->get();
});

source: this commit

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1 Comment

Thank you, +1 for pointing out the source code, which was a great help.
6

Nicer solution instead of file_get_contents will be to use the SPL class methods as FileUpload is already extending them.

$file = Input::file('summary')->openFile();
$book->SummaryText = $file->fread($file->getSize());

To read more about SplFileInfo and SplFileObject see:

As those could be really usefull and using SPL which is OOP is nicer solution than structural PHP functions.

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1 Comment

What is nicer about it? Does it provide some inherit error checking?
-1 
\File::get($directory.$filename);

Worked for my project, where directory and filename are determined by the upload methods. The backslash is used when creating workspaces (packages) in laravel4.

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