PHP Socket I/O Methods

Question

What is the preferred method for reading/writing to TCP/IP sockets in PHP? There are many, many ways of doing it, including:

fread() and fwrite()
fgets() and fputs()
file_get_contents() and file_put_contents()
stream_get_contents()
stream_socket_recvfrom() and stream_socket_sendto()
probably several others that I've not run across...

I realize that fgets() and fputs() operate a bit differently (by lines instead of arbitrary chunks of data), but I really don't understand the differences in the others and which method would be best for what purposes.

Edit: Also socket_recv() and socket_send().

Edit #2: Also socket_read() and socket_write().

webbiedave · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-31 00:55:13Z

3

With many of these functions, one can specify offsets and max lengths, providing much overlap (and confusion) between them. Generally, however, they are used as described here:

fread, fwrite, stream_socket_recvfrom, stream_socket_sendto read/write a specific number of bytes at a time.
fgets, fputs read/write a line at a time.
file_get_contents, file_put_contents, stream_get_contents read/write entire streams of content at a time.

answered Jan 31, 2012 at 0:55

webbiedave

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2 Comments

FtDRbwLXw6 Over a year ago

I've studied the manual pages for all these functions before posting here. I guess I'm looking for more of an explanation why there are 5+ sets of methods that can all do roughly the same things. Even the functions which accept offsets/lengths

tkone Over a year ago

@drrcknlsn because that's what PHP is known for. To quote our own Jeff Atwood PHP "is like an virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory." (codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/…) There are ton of methods because people wrote a ton of different ways to do the same thing.

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