Streaming output to a file and the browser

Question

So, I'm looking for something more efficient than this:

<?php
ob_start();
include 'test.php';
$content = ob_get_contents();

file_put_contents('test.html', $content);

echo $content;
?>

The problems with the above:

• Client doesn't receive anything until the entire page is rendered
• File might be enormous, so I'd rather not have the whole thing in memory

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Interesting problem; don't think I've tried to solve this before.

I'm thinking you'll need to have a second request going from your front-facing PHP script to your server. This could be a simple call to http://localhost/test.php. If you use fopen-wrappers, you could use fread() to pull the output of test.php as it is rendered, and after each chunk is received, output it to the screen and append it to your test.html file.

Here's how that might look (untested!):

<?php
$remote_fp = fopen("http://localhost/test.php", "r");
$local_fp = fopen("test.html", "w");
while ($buf = fread($remote_fp, 1024)) {
    echo $buf;
    fwrite($local_fp, $buf);
}
fclose($remote_fp);
fclose($local_fp);
?>