I'm sorry if my wording is going to be off or my question is a little too vague.
Let's say I have a simple script sitting on an Ubuntu box running Apache with mod_php. This is the entirety of my script:
<?php
echo 'Hello, World!';
?>
What happens when I call echo? Does the text get written to a buffer somewhere and then sent to the client when the script ends? I'd like to get a handle on something low level like that.
Usually, the script output (notice my phrasing) gets sent directly to the client during the parsing of the script.
When you want to store (read: buffer) the output before sending it, you can use output buffering, like Yazmat already mentioned.
I think you are looking for this : Output Buffering
What's in my mind is, when the server is called by a client to view their hosted PHP file, the server will sent an executed PHP script to the client, so it's not a PHP script anymore.
Related
Let's say a user submits a form to submit.php, the server will return two possible responses: A or B. If the server is going to return B, then I'd like the server to send an email to an address.
<?php
if(B){
echo 'B';
}
mail($to, $subj, $msg);
?>
The problem is that it often takes some time to wait mail() to finish... the user can only get responses after the server finishes mail(). This is a very bad experience for my users.
Is there any way that the server can return response 'B' to the user immediately, then it sends mail?
Take a look at the flush() function
Flushes the write buffers of PHP and whatever backend PHP is using (CGI, a web server, etc). This attempts to push current output all the way to the browser with a few caveats.
flush() may not be able to override the buffering scheme of your web server and it has no effect on any client-side buffering in the browser. It also doesn't affect PHP's userspace output buffering mechanism. This means you will have to call both ob_flush() and flush() to flush the ob output buffers if you are using those.
You can use a task queueing platform to execute asynchronous tasks, it shouldn't be so complicated to setup, something like ActiveMQ
Change the code to the following:
if (B) {
echo 'B';
flush();
ob_flush();
}
However, it should be noted that many things could prevent this from working (as quoted from the flush() documentation):
Several servers, especially on Win32, will still buffer the output from your script until it terminates before transmitting the results to the browser.
Server modules for Apache like mod_gzip may do buffering of their own that will cause flush() to not result in data being sent immediately to the client.
Even the browser may buffer its input before displaying it. Netscape, for example, buffers text until it receives an end-of-line or the beginning of a tag, and it won't render tables until the </table> tag of the outermost table is seen.
Some versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer will only start to display the page after they have received 256 bytes of output, so you may need to send extra whitespace before flushing to get those browsers to display the page.
Use this PHP functionality register_shutdown_function
<?php
if(B){
echo 'B';
}
$m = "mail($to, $subj, $msg);";
register_shutdown_function(create_function('',$m));
?>
register_shutdown_function: Register a function for execution on shutdown
the trick is to use create_function() to create a "function" that calls the desired function with static parameters.
more about create_function()
Good day!
I am having some issues with getting the echo statement to output before the execution of the exec()
<?
if (isset($_POST['ipaddress'])) {
$escaped_command = escapeshellcmd($_POST['ipaddress']);
if(filter_var($escaped_command, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP)) {
echo "Gleaning ARP information, please wait..";
$command = exec('sudo /sbin/getarp.exp');
The echo statement is being outputted after the execution of the $command. The execution time can be anywhere from 15-30 seconds depending on how large the ARP table on the remote router is. Is there an order of operations that I am not aware of? It appears that all the statements within the if statement are executed in parallel and not by line by line as I had assumed.
I would rather not a solution be provided, but some documentational links that would lead me to finding a solution. I have searched what I could, but was not able to find a viable solution.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
This is happening because the script will run in its entirety before any result/output is sent to the browser.
In PHP there is a concept of "output buffering".
Whenever you output something (e.g. using echo, print, etc.) the text is thrown into a buffer. This buffer is only sent at certain times (at the end of the request, for instance, or when the buffer is full).
In order to empty the buffer (to "flush" it) you need to do it manually. The flush() function will do this. Sometimes you also need to call ob_flush() (this is if you have opened custom output buffers yourself). It is generally a good idea to just call both functions and be done with it:
echo 'Wait a few seconds...';
flush(); ob_flush();
sleep(3);
echo ' aaand we are done!';
See Output Buffering Control for more information on output buffering in PHP.
This is probably an issue with the output buffer. PHP buffers output and writes it to the browser in chunks. Try adding a call to ob_flush() between the echo and the exec(); this will force PHP to write the current contents of the buffer to the browser.
By default, php does not send any of the output until the php script is done running completely. There is a solution. However, I hear it is a little browser dependent. I would test it on different systems and browsers to see if it is working:
ob_implicit_flush (true)
Put that before any of your echo/print commands and that should allow anything printed to show right up on the browser.
A more universal approach would be to integrate your page with asynchronous javascript. A process commonly referred to as "AJAX". It is a little more difficult because it requires the use of many interacting scripts, some client-side and some server-side. However, AJAX is the defacto way to do thing like this on the web.
I have a script that shows a result done then i call an include file to run at intervals. I would like the script result to display on browser then include file will run in the back. Right now my browser is connecting but showing nothing.I would like the browser echo Done and Logging.
<?php
ob_implicit_flush(true);
require_once('syslog.php');
$syslog = new Syslog();
$line="My msg";
$hostname = gethostname();
$ip= #$REMOTE_ADDR;
$hostnameip = GetHostByName($ip);
$syslog->Send('127.0.9.1', $hostname." ".$hostnameip." ".$line);
echo"Done";
echo "Logging......";
ob_end_flush();
include('execute.php');
?>
I believe you'll be able to get what you want by calling the flush() method right after your echo commands.
The flush() function is described as -
Flushes the write buffers of PHP and whatever backend PHP is using (CGI, a web server, etc). This attempts to push current output all the way to the browser with a few caveats.
There are some special considerations when using this function. Certain apache modules and client side buffering will still be enforced, but for now however, I do believe this will help.
Try flush() before include after last echo.
Final update
Seems like I did make a very simple error. Since I already have a stream implementation I can just not start reading from the stream :D
I'm trying to achieve fire-and-forget like functionality in PHP.
From php.net
<?php
ignore_user_abort(true);
header("Content-Length: 4");
header("Connection: Close");
echo "abcd";
flush();
sleep(5);
echo "Text user should not see"; // because it should have terminated
?>
This works if I open the script with a browser. (shows "abcd").
But if I open it with file_get_contents or some stream library it will wait for ~5 seconds and show the second text as well.
I'm using PHP 5.2.11 / Apache 2.0
Update
I seems there is some confusion about what I'm trying to accomplish.
I don't want to hide output using output buffers (that's stupid). I want to have the client terminate before the server starts a possibly lengthy process (sleep(5)) and I don't want the client to wait for it (this is what fire-and-forget means, sort off).
The use of output buffers is merely a side effect. I've amended the sample code without the use of output buffers.
What I don't understand is: why does this script behave differently when accessing it from the browser vs. fetching it in PHP with file_get_contents("http://dev/test.php") or some stream library? What I've seen in testing is that for instance stream_get_contents will actually block for 5 seconds before it returns any output at all, the is quite the opposite of what I want.
Update2
Some more results:
The browser somehow responds to the flush(). I can't figure out how to replicate this behavior with streams in PHP, my streams keep blocking.
I've tried fread and found that it behaves similar to stream_get_contents.
Specifying a maxlength has no effect, it will still block for ~5 seconds.
Changing the blocking mode has no effect (other than generating a bunch more calls to stream_get_contents()). It will wait ~5 seconds before returning anything.
stream_set_read_buffer has no effect (tested on a PHP 5.3.5 sever)
The second portion of text is showing up because you're stopping output buffering with ob_end_flush() and ob_end_clean(). When that happens PHP outputs content as normal. Try something like the following:
<?php
ob_start(); // turn on output buffering
print "Text the user will see.";
ob_flush(); // send above output to the user and keep output buffering on
print "Text the user will never see";
ob_end_clean(); // empty the buffer and turn off output buffering. your script should end here.
?>
It's important for ob_end_clean() to appear at the end of the script. It empties the buffer and does not send its contents to the user, thus keeping everything after ob_flush() hidden.
How do you access the script using file_get_contents? How do you access it with your browser? If you access the script without "http://", of course it will never get executed. Use the same URL as in the browser.
Edit:
The browser will render the page even before the connection is closed. Even if you flush, I don't think the connection is closed. You can fire up Wireshark and check. stream_get_contents and file_get_contents will block until they have all the output. Even if you flushed, they can't be sure that there isn't more content. Since the content-length header didn't seem to make {file,stream}_get_contents return earlier, you probably need to implement your own buffering, ala. fopen, read, fclose.
Seems like I did make a very simple error. Since I already have a stream implementation I can just not start reading from the stream :D
If I'm generating a stream of data to send out to a browser, and the user closes the browser, can I tell within PHP that I don't need to bother generating or sending the rest of the stream? I'd like to insert something into this loop:
while (!feof($pipes[1])) {
echo fgets($pipes[1]);
}
My fallback plan is to have the browser use a JavaScript onunload to hit another PHP page to kill the process that's generating the data, but it would be cleaner if PHP could tell when I'm echoing to nowhere.
By default PHP will abort the script if the user navigates away. There are however times where you don't want this to happen so php has a config you set called ignore_user_abort.
http://php.net/manual/en/misc.configuration.php
There's also a function called register_shutdown_function() that is supposedly executed when execution halts. I've never actually used it, so I won't vouch for how well it works, but I thought I'd mention it for completeness.
I believe that script will automatically abort when loaded normally (No ajax). But if you want to implement some sort of long polling via php using xmlhttprequest I think you will have to do it with some sort of javascript because then php can't detect it. Also like to know the precise case.
These answers pointed me towards what I was looking for. The underlying process needed special attention to kill it. I needed to jump out of the loop. Thanks again, Stack Overflow.
while (!feof($pipes[1]) && !connection_aborted())
{
echo fgets($pipes[1]);
}
if (connection_aborted())
{
exec('kill -4 '.$mypid);
}