Re: [Php-java-bridge-users] Reading fsockopen stream causes Severe error in PhpCGIServlet

[<php...@li...>]

Mark,

you don't seem to understand the issue.

1. A GET request must be answered by the HTTP 1.1 server by either
sending the Content-Length header or by sending the Transfer-Encoding:
chunked header.

2. To send large responses efficiently, Transfer-Encoding: chunked is
used.

3. The network buffer used by the PHP streams implementation reads data
eagerly. If you fread($socket, 1024) and the network buffer already
contains 24 bytes, PHP will try to read 1000 bytes nevertheless.

4. If you open a HTTP 1.0 connection to a HTTP server which cannot
respond with a Content-Length header, the behaviour is implementation
specific. It may send an error, send a raw byte stream or it may start
playing nethack.

5. PHP running within Apache behaves exactly the same as PHP running
within a JEE server or servlet engine. The only difference is that Java
prints a stack trace when the hanging PHP instance is killed, while
Apache silently kills it with SIGCHILD.


You don't have many choices to implement your "stream download". Either
you use HTTP/1.1 chunked connections, or you will have to deal with an
implementation-specific behaviour of both, the HTTP server (#4) *and*
PHP (#3).

Since the PHP streams implementation cannot handle raw byte streams
which don't have an explicit length (either Content-Length or the length
from each "chunked" header), you cannot use PHP fread --- your "fgets()"
is bogus because you do not and cannot distinguish between the \r\n from
the data and the \r\n used to split the packets, so your download is
garbage anyway --- to receive the data, unless the remote server shuts
down the connection at the end of the transfer, so that PHP's fread (or
fgets) doesn't try to fill its network buffer over the end of the data. 

If you want to discuss this issue further, please use the PHP mailing
list instead. 


Regards,
Jost Bökemeier