Posted by amygdala on 07/19/06 05:36

Hi,

I'm trying to familiarise myself with socket programming in PHP on a XP Home
SP2 box with Apache 2.0.58 / PHP 5.1.4.

I've ran a few basic scripts now which I accessed through a telnet
session. The purpose of these scripts is to simply return the input I type.
They all pretty much have the same routine as shown below:

-- begin snippet --

do {
// read client input
$input = socket_read($spawn, 1024, PHP_NORMAL_READ) or die("Could not read
input\n");

if (trim($input) != "") {
echo "Received input: $input\n";

// if client requests session end
if (trim($input) == "END") {
// close the child socket
// break out of loop
socket_close($spawn);
break;
}
// otherwise...
else {
// reverse client input and send back
$output = strrev($input) . "\n";
socket_write($spawn, $output . "? ", strlen (($output)+3)) or
die("Could not write output\n");
echo "Sent output: " . trim($output) . "\n";
}
}
} while (true);

-- end code snippet --

Now, I read that the PHP_NORMAL_READ argument to socket_read() is buggy.
This seems to be true for my configuration as well. When ommitting this
argument the server seems to run fine except for 1 thing: The server returns
every single character I type immediately, thus refusing to accept the 'END'
request for instance. I would like to let the server return my input only
when I have hit enter. The PHP manual seems to tell me that that is just
exactly what the PHP_NORMAL_READ argument is supposed to accomplish.

Is this true? And if so, is there a workaround for this?

My goal is to write a low-end game server communicating with a flash client.
I could imagine that in that case this isn't so much of an issue anymore
since this client will probably send a whole 'command' string at a time. Is
this a correct assumption?

Thanks for your input.

[Back to original message]