Need Help With Sockets in PHP

[gaza165]

I am trying to formulate a script that can output strings using sockets.

 

so far i have this code that creates and provides the user with a welcome message.

 

<?php

// don't timeout
set_time_limit (0);

// set some variables
$host = "192.168.81.130";
$port = 3333;

// create socket
$socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0) or die("Could not create
socket\n");

// bind socket to port
$result = socket_bind($socket, $host, $port) or die("Could not bind to
socket\n");

// start listening for connections
$result = socket_listen($socket, 3) or die("Could not set up socket
listener\n");

echo "Waiting for connections...\n";

// accept incoming connections
// spawn another socket to handle communication
$spawn = socket_accept($socket) or die("Could not accept incoming
connection\n");

echo "Received connection request\n";

// write a welcome message to the client
$welcome = "Roll up, roll up, to the greatest show on earth!\n? ";
socket_write($spawn, $welcome, strlen ($welcome)) or die("Could not send
connect string\n");

?>

 

i then open another file that gets the welcome message and displays it to the user.

 

<?php

$host="192.168.81.130";
$port = 3333;



// open a client connection
$fp = pfsockopen ($host, $port, $errno, $errstr);

if (!$fp)
{
      $result = "Error: could not open socket connection";
}
else
{
  // get the welcome message
     	$result .= fgets ($fp, 1024);
}


?>
Server said: <b><? echo $result; ?></b>

 

This works fine, however, once the script has finished the connection the to the socket server is close, how do i keep the session persistently open to keep feeding and outputting new strings??

 

Thanks

 

Garry

[JAY6390]

You'd need to have a loop of some sort (for/while/do while) and just keep looping until the connection is broken then break out of the loop and clean up

[gaza165]

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to do that??

 

I need a loop to keep the connection open to look for new messages???

[premiso]

You want to look into AJAX, using AJAX you can make server calls and it can re-run the connection and check for new messages. Other than that you have to do a forced reload, as even just sleep the script while setting the set_time_limit to infinite will slow down your server a ton by eating up the memory. Better to do the AJAX calls and get the data that way.

[MadTechie]

If you have threaded apache then your connection will close when the script terminates, try using non-threaded,

however premiso suggestion would be better!