Creating streams from strings in PHP

By Evert on 2009-01-30 05:18:55

I'm in the process of writing an API that relies on (file-)streams to be passed around.

There are situations where a string instead needs to be used, and for these purposes the data: stream wrapper is used. Initially I thought it was only possible to encode the actual string in base64, which I didn't like because of the added footprint.


<?php



$string = "I should have really done some laundry tonight.";



$stream = fopen('data://text/plain;base64,' . base64_encode($string),'r');



echo stream_get_contents($stream);



?>

Quickly checking out the rfc, it turns out that ';base64' can be omitted to just pass along the raw data, which makes a lot more sense in the context of PHP.

Thankfully, PHP gladly supports it:


<?php



$string = "I tried, honestly!";



$stream = fopen('data://text/plain,' . $string,'r');



echo stream_get_contents($stream);



?>

Digg Creating streams from strings in PHP

Comments

Josh said on Friday, 30 January 2009 at 3:57 pm CET

My favorite usage of the data: wrapper is for raw uploaded csv data. If you let user's cut-n-paste a csv for upload you can use the data: wrapper to fopen the POST data then fgetcsv() on it to save yourself from parsing it manually.

Michael Gauthier said on Friday, 30 January 2009 at 5:47 pm CET

Great tip, thanks! I might use this to simplify some code I have that works with either IPC pipes or strings.

ellisgl said on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 at 2:24 pm CET

@Josh: Thanks for an awesome example of how to use it.

Adidas outlet said on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 at 3:35 pm CET

very informative thank you.

't Bijstere spoor

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