Introduction

These functions allow you to access records stored in dBase-format (dbf) databases.

dBase files are simple sequential files of fixed length records. Records are appended to the end of the file and delete records are kept until you call dbase_pack().

The types of dBase fields available are:

Available types of fields

Field	dBase Type	Format	Additional information
M	Memo	n/a	This type is not supported by PHP, such field will be ignored
D	Date	YYYYMMDD	The field length is limited to 8
N	Number	A number	You must declare a length and a precision (the number of digits after the decimal point)
C	String	A string	You must declare a length. When retrieving data, the string will be right-padded with spaces to fit the declared length.
L	Boolean	T or Y for TRUE, F or N for FALSE	Stored and returned as an integer (1 or 0)
F	Float	A float number	Support for this type of field was added in PHP 5.2.0

Installation

In order to enable the bundled dbase library and to use these functions, you must compile PHP with the --enable-dbase option.

Runtime Configuration

This extension has no configuration directives defined in php.ini.

Resource Types

This extension has no resource types defined.

Examples

Many examples in this reference require a dBase database. We will use /tmp/test.dbf that will be created in the example of dbase_create().

Predefined Constants

This extension has no constants defined.