I know PHP is usually used for web development, where there is no standard input, but PHP claims to be usable as a general-purpose scripting language, if you do follow it's funky web-based conventions. I know that PHP prints to stdout (or whatever you want to call it) with print and echo, which is simple enough, but I'm wondering how a PHP script might get input from stdin (specifically with fgetc(), but any input function is good), or is this even possible?
Answer
It is possible to read the stdin by creating a file handle to php://stdin and then read from it with fgets() for a line for example (or, as you already stated, fgetc() for a single character):
<?php
$f = fopen( 'php://stdin', 'r' );
while( $line = fgets( $f ) ) {
echo $line;
}
fclose( $f );
?>