php://memory wrapper

[448191]

I recently looked at the php://memory and php://temp wrappers, but I fail to see the use of it. I was hoping (idle hope) these would persist across requests, so I could utilize them for session management, but it gets terminated with execution environment of each request, so no go.

 

Anybody has any idea how these wrappers might be useful?

[448191]

Hah. Came across this ancient post and decided to answer my own question.

 

I've recently found a use for these wrappers: to use with file manipulation functions.

 

Example:

 

/**
* Private string parser for factory method
*
* @param string $string
* @param string $delimiter
* @param string $enclosure
* 
* @return array
*/
private static function _parseString($string, $delimiter, $enclosure)
{
$maxMemAllocation = 2 * 1024 * 1024;

$handle = fopen("php://temp/maxmemory:$maxMemAllocation", 'r+');
fwrite($handle, $string);
rewind($handle);

$rows = array();

while(false !== ($row = fgetcsv($handle, null, $delimiter, $enclosure)))
{
	$rows[] = $row;
}

$keys = array_shift($rows);

foreach($rows as $row)
{
	$assocRows[] = array_combine($keys, $row);
}
return $assocRows;
}

 

There's no string counterpart of fgetcsv (str_getcsv is only in CVS), so this saves me a little trouble not having to write csv parsing code, with hardly any performance loss, possibly none.