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);
- ?>
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.
Great tip, thanks! I might use this to simplify some code I have that works with either IPC pipes or strings.
@Josh: Thanks for an awesome example of how to use it.