Binary interoperability between gzdecode() and inflate_add() - php

I wrote a small WebSocket library a while back, and found adding gzip support surprisingly easy. I didn't fully realize at the time that the deflate_init() / deflate_add() / inflate_init() / inflate_add() functions were actually PHP 7-only, and now I'd like to be able to run my WebSocket server under PHP 5 environments.
My problem is, deflate_add() produces output that differs slightly from gzdeflate() - by one character in the testcase below.
The deflate_add()/inflate_add()-based approach works perfectly in-browser, so the output of gzdeflate() is the incorrect one. I'm guessing gzdeflate()/gzinflate() are using zlib with different underlying options - something related to stream state, maybe? - and that's causing everything to fall apart.
Ultimately I want to know if I can convince PHP 5-era zlib functions to output "correct" deflated data.
First of all, the deflate_init()/deflate_add()-based approach I used on PHP 7:
$data = "ABC";
$ctx = deflate_init(ZLIB_ENCODING_RAW);
// unfortunately I can't find the gigantic blog post with example code
// that I learned from :(, but it contained the Ruby equivalent of the
// the substr() below. I blinked at it a bit but apparently this is how
// it's done.
$deflated = substr(deflate_add($ctx, $data, ZLIB_SYNC_FLUSH), 0, -4);
// $deflated is now "rtr\6\0"
$ictx = inflate_init(ZLIB_ENCODING_RAW);
$data2 = inflate_add($ictx, $deflated, ZLIB_NO_FLUSH);
// $data2 is now "ABC"
Here's what happens if I use gzdeflate()/gzinflate():
$data = "ABC";
$deflated = gzdeflate($data, 9, ZLIB_ENCODING_RAW);
// $deflated is now "str\6\0"
$output = gzinflate($deflated);
// $output is now "ABC"
Trying to gzinflate() the output of inflate_add() produces a data error. As a TL;DR:
print gzinflate("rtr\6\0")."\n"; // will bomb out
print gzinflate("str\6\0")."\n"; // prints "ABC"

What you are calling correct is incorrect, and what you are calling incorrect is correct.
With deflate_add you are deliberately creating an unterminated, i.e. invalid, deflate stream. Why, I have no idea. (Nor, apparently, do you, since this came from a "gigantic blog post" that you cannot find.) This is being done with the ZLIB_SYNC_FLUSH which completes the current deflate block and appends an empty stored block. The substr(,,-4) is removing most of that empty stored block at the end, leaving you with an incomplete, invalid inflate stream, prematurely ending in the middle of a stored block.
gzdeflate on the other hand is creating a properly terminated deflate stream, with a single deflate block marked as the last block. The only difference between the two streams is the first (least significant) bit, which is a 1 to mark the last block.
You do not say how the properly terminated deflate stream is "causing everything to fall apart". In any case, you can make a properly terminated deflate stream with deflate_add by using ZLIB_FINISH instead of ZLIB_SYNC_FLUSH, and forgoing the substr.
There is no way to make an invalid deflate stream with gzdeflate, if that's what you're asking. You can't just change the first bit, since for a larger string, the last block may not be the first block.

Related

Piecemeal bzcompression for large files in PHP

Creating bzip2 archived data in PHP is very easy thanks to its implementation in bzcompress. In my present application I cannot in all reason simply read the input file into a string and then call bzcompress or bzwrite. The PHP documentation does not make it clear whether successive calls to bzwrite with relatively small amounts of data will yield the same result as when compressing the whole file in one single swoop. I mean something along the lines of
$data = file_get_contents('/path/to/bigfile');
$cdata = bzcompress($data);
I tried out a piecemeal bzcompression using the routines shown below
function makeBZFile($infile,$outfile)
{
$fp = fopen($infile,'r');
$bz = bzopen($outfile,'w');
while (!feof($fp))
{
$bytes = fread($fp,10240);
bzwrite($bz,$bytes);
}
bzclose($bz);
fclose($fp);
}
function unmakeBZFile($infile,$outfile)
{
$bz = bzopen($infile,'r');
while (!feof($bz))
{
$str = bzread($bz,10240);
file_put_contents($outfile,$str,FILE_APPEND);
}
}
set_time_limit(1200);
makeBZFile('/tmp/test.rnd','/tmp/test.bz');
unmakeBZFile('/tmp/test.bz','/tmp/btest.rnd');
To test this code I did two things
I used makeBZFile and unmakeBZFile to compress and then decompress a SQLite database - which is what I need to do eventually.
I created a 50Mb filled with random data dd if=/dev/urandom of='/tmp.test.rnd bs=50M count=1
In both cases I performed a diff original.file decompressed.file and found that the two were identical.
All very nice but it is not clear to me why this is working. The PHP docs state that bzread(bzpointer,length) reads a maximum length bytes of UNCOMPRESSED data. If my code below is woring it is because I am forcing the bzwite and bzread size to 10240 bytes.
What I cannot see is just how bzread knows how to fetch lenth bytes of UNCOMPRESSED data. I checked out the format of a bzip2 file. I cannot see tht there is anything there which helps easily establish the uncompressed data length for a chunk of the .bz file.
I suspect there is a gap in my understanding of how this works - or else the fact that my code below appears to perform a correct piecemeal compression is purely accidental.
I'd much appreciate a few explanations here.
To understand how the decompression get the length of bytes you have to understand first the compression. It seems that you don't know any thing about compression algorigthim.
BZIP2
Crucial algorithm of BZIP2 is the Burrows Wheeler transformation (BWT), that converts the original data into a suitable form for following coding. The current version applies a Huffman code. Compression algorithm processes the data in blocks totally independent from each block. Block sizes can be set in a range from 1-9 (100,000 - 900,000 bytes).
BZIP2 Data Structure
The first two character of compressed string start with letter 'BZ' and thereafter 1 byte for algorigthim used. Thereafter identification of the block size immediately follows, being valid for the entire file (h1, h2, h3 to h9). The parameter indicates the block size in units from 1-9 (100,000 - 900,000 bytes).
Actual original data are stored in blocks according to the selected size and will be protected individually with a CRC32 checksum. Additionally a 48 bit identifier introduces each block. This block structure allows a partial reconstruction of damaged files.
GZIP/BZIP
Gzip and bzip2 are functionally equivalent. One advantage of GZIP is that it can compress a stream, a sequence where you can't look behind. This makes it the official compressor of http streams. GZZIP DEFLATE RFC 1951 Compressed Data Format Specification and GUNZIP RFC 1952 File Format Specification are published documents.
GIP explained

Encode string in Android so PHP would be able to gzdecompress it?

How do I correctly compress a string, so PHP would be able to decompress?
I tried this:
public static byte[] compress(String string) throws IOException {
ByteArrayOutputStream os = new ByteArrayOutputStream(string.length());
DeflaterOutputStream gos = new DeflaterOutputStream(os);
// ALSO TRIED GZOutputStream, same results!
gos.write(string.getBytes());
gos.close();
byte[] compressed = os.toByteArray();
os.close();
return compressed;
}
But PHP does not recognize output as valid GZip compressed string...
The problem seems to be in some headers / footers being added by Android...
For example when I compress something word via PHP with gzcompress I got similar results as with Android, but not similar enough, so PHP could read it:
something (HEX DUMP):
Android: 1f8b08000000000000002bcecf4d2dc9c8cc4b0700fb31da0909000000
PHP: 789c2bcecf4d2dc9c8cc4b0700134703cf
The weirdest thing is that by changing GZOutputStream to DeflaterOutputStream it fixed the problem with something word, but the problem still appears with longer strings...
PS. Removing heading 10 characters from Android generated data does not help at all.
EDIT: I tried to decompress it in PHP with:
gzdecode() - this function does not exist in standard Debian PHP5
version.
gzdecompress() - does not work
And some functions to emulate gzdecode() from PHP site comments that don't really do much.
All above, with removing first 10 bytes and leaving them.
PS2. I tried every single solution from Stack Overflow, and other sources, and still nothing. It is not a duplicate.
EDIT2 (BINARY DUMP): Sample data generated with Android that can't be decomprssed by gzuncompress() or pseudo-gzdecode() functions from PHP.NET: data.compressed.
It supposed to be some JSON, after decompression.
The Android data that starts with 1f8b is a gzip stream. In php you use gzdecode() for that. gzencode() on php makes gzip streams.
The php data that starts with 789c is a zlib stream. You used gzcompress() to make that, and you would use gzuncompress() to decode it.
The compressed data contained within both of those streams, starting with 2bce is raw deflate data. You can use gzinflate() to decode that if you happened to make it somewhere, and you can use gzdeflate() to generate raw deflate.
Just to rant, gzencode(), gzcompress(), and gzdeflate() are some of the most misleading function names ever concocted, since only one of them is related to gzip yet all start with gz, and nothing in the name gzcompress() indicates zlib.
Update:
The "EDIT2" data is, for some reason, doubly compressed. It was compressed first to the zlib format, and then that zlib stream was compressed to the gzip format. (Though gzip couldn't compress the already compressed data, so it's a little bigger.)
You should repair the problem that made it doubly compressed. Or if you have no control over that, you can doubly decompress it, first stripping the gzip header using the RFC 1952 specification and then gzinflate() on the raw deflate data, and then using gzdecompress() on the result.

string contain many '\0' after inflate

I try to decompress blocks of data which were compressed with zlib and author made remarks that for decompress i must use inflate_init and inflate with Z_SYNC_FLUSH. I sure that this must work because that works on php in this way :
$temp = substr($temp, 2, -4);
$temp{0} = chr(ord($temp{0}) | 1);
$temp = gzinflate($temp);
but i ckecked many method for decompress this on C++ and every time fail.
Here is one of them :
char compressedblockbuffer[3371];
char uncompressedblockbuffer[8192];
is.read(compressedblockbuffer, 3371);
z_stream strm;
strm.zalloc = Z_NULL;
strm.zfree = Z_NULL;
strm.opaque = Z_NULL;
strm.avail_in = 3371;
strm.next_in = (Bytef *)compressedblockbuffer;
strm.avail_out = 8192;
strm.next_out = (Bytef *)uncompressedblockbuffer;
inflateInit(&strm);
inflate(&strm, Z_SYNC_FLUSH);
inflateEnd(&strm);
It's not full code, just example to show problem and thats why i specified already known sizes.
I use last zlib realize so may be something change in the zlib inflate since 2003-2004 years?
So the result is :
So seems that uncompressedblockbuffer contains '\0' at the 2,3,4 indexes and many other and if i print this to console i just see two first elements.
UPD:
If gzinflate() in PHP works on the data, then your code won't. gzinflate() expects raw deflate data. Your code is looking for zlib-wrapped deflate data. If you want to decode raw deflate data, you need to use inflateInit2(&strm, -15) instead.
Your call to inflate() is likely returning an error that you are not checking for. You need to always check the return codes of the zlib routines, or for that matter any function that has the potential to return an error.
What kind of data are you decompressing? Many binary formats are perfectly accepting of NUL bytes in their data, since it just reads as a value of 0. For example, inside of image data in many formats, it'd just represent a value of 0 in either that channel or pixel (depending on data size). Not to mention, binary formats don't necessarily read as bytes. A NUL byte may actually be a part of a 2- or 4-byte value.
This is the problem with trying to read binary data as a character string. Binary data needn't follow the rules of text. This is why usually the data boundary is a separate size value, because it can't terminate on NUL values like text.
If you have the original uncompressed data for comparison, either load that data into memory and compare the data, or save the decompressed data to a file and use a diff tool to do a binary comparison of the files.

Parsing large file using php linux server

I am a php programmer and currently I am working with files. I have to parse and insert the data to mysql database. Since its large amount of data php unable to load or parse the file. I am getting memory leak error even though I have increased memory_limit upto 1500MB.
FATAL: emalloc(): Unable to allocate 456185835 bytes
my text file contains text and xml data. I have to parse the xml data from the text file.
eg: <ajax>some text goes here</ajax> non relativ text <ajax>other content</ajax>
In the above example I have to parse the content inside tag. If any one can give some advice to separate each tag into individual file(eg: 1.txt, 2.txt), it will be great(perl or c or shell scripting..etc ).
Cough... a 1500 MB memory limit is a sure sign you have gone off the rails.
Where are you getting your file? I assume (given the size) that this is a local file. If you are trying to load the file into a string using file_get_contents() it is worth noting that the docs are wrong and that said function does not in fact using memory-mapped I/O (cf. bug 52802). So this is not going to work for you.
What you might try is instead falling back to more C-like (but still PHP) constructs, in particular fopen(), fseek(), and fread(). If the file is of a known structure with newlines, you might also consider fgets().
These should allow you to read in bytes in chunks into a reasonable size buffer from which you can do your processing. Since it looks like you are processing tagged strings, you will have to play the usual games of keeping multiple buffers around in which you can accumulate data until processable. This is fairly standard stuff covered in most introductions to, e.g., stream processing in C.
Note that in PHP (or any other language for that matter), you are also going to have to potentially consider issues of string encoding because, in general, it is no longer the case that 1 byte == 1 character (cf. Unicode).
As you insinuate, PHP may well not be the best language for this task (though it certainly can do it). But your problem isn't really a language-specific one; you are running into a fundamental limitation of handling large files without memory-mapping.
you can actually parse XML with PHP a small block at a time so you dont actually require much ram at all:
set_time_limit(0);
define('__BUFFER_SIZE__', 131072);
define('__XML_FILE__', 'pf_1360591.xml');
function elementStart($p, $n, $a) {
//handle opening of elements
}
function elementEnd($p, $n) {
//handle closing of elements
}
function elementData($p, $d) {
//handle cdata in elements
}
$xml = xml_parser_create();
xml_parser_set_option($xml, XML_OPTION_TARGET_ENCODING, 'UTF-8');
xml_parser_set_option($xml, XML_OPTION_CASE_FOLDING, 0);
xml_parser_set_option($xml, XML_OPTION_SKIP_WHITE, 1);
xml_set_element_handler($xml, 'elementStart', 'elementEnd');
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml, 'elementData');
$f = fopen(__XML_FILE__, 'r');
if($f) {
while(!feof($f)) {
$content = fread($f, __BUFFER_SIZE__);
xml_parse($xml, $content, feof($f));
unset($content);
}
fclose($f);
}

Large print/echo break http response

I am having a problem with an echo/print that returns a large amount of data. The response is broken and is as follows:
end of data
http response header printed in body
start of data
I am running the following script to my browser to replicate the problem:
<?php
// Make a large array of strings
for($i=0;$i<10000;$i++)
{
$arr[] = "testing this string becuase it is must longer than all the rest to see if we can replicate the problem. testing this string becuase it is must longer than all the rest to see if we can replicate the problem. testing this string becuase it is must longer than all the rest to see if we can replicate the problem.";
}
// Create one large string from array
$var = implode("-",$arr);
// Set HTTP headers to ensure we are not 'chunking' response
header('Content-Length: '.strlen($var));
header('Content-type: text/html');
// Print response
echo $var;
?>
What is happening here?
Can someone else try this?
You might have automatic output buffering activated on your server. If the buffer overflows, it just starts pooping out the rest of the data instead.
Note that something like gzip compression also implicitly buffers the output. If it's the case, an ob_end_flush() call after the headers should solve it.
Browsers often limits the characters you're allowed to pass through a get variable.
To work around this, you could base 64 encode the string, and then decode it, once you recievede the respone.
I think there's javascript base 64 encode libraries available.
Like this one:
http://www.webtoolkit.info/javascript-base64.html

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