The best way to show line per line the contents of a file is using the file(); function which returns an array where each element of this array contains a line of the file.
lines.txt :
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
PHP Script :
$lines = file("lines.txt");
foreach($lines as $data){
echo $data . "<br>";
}
// You can also directly input the text file in the foreach function :
foreach(file("lines.txt") as $data)
echo $data . ''<br>";
The result would look exaclty like the text file.
You can also use int readfile(string file); to read and print out the whole content of the file which is better is you just want to write out the whole textfile rather than doing line per line manipulation. (It returns the number of characters read.)