Using Sockets in PHP

by Andrew Walsh
2004-06-24

Synopsis
In this tutorial, Andrew teaches how using socket connections in PHP is both easy and
practical.

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/76/1.html Page 1
 Using Sockets in PHP
by Andrew Walsh

Introduction
Sockets are a method in which PHP can connect to another server over the Internet
and networks. The basic function to open a socket to a server is fsockopen(). You
may be wondering why you would want to connect to another server? If you need to
obtain information from a 3rd party server then sockets are for you.

Making the Connection

You may think connecting to another Internet server is difficult but you would be wrong.
You can establish a connection in just one line of PHP code. In this section I will show
you how to simply connect and disconnect using sockets.

<?php

/*
Arguments that fsockopen takes:
fsockopen(Hostname/IP, Port Number, Error Number
Variable, Error Description Variable)
The error number variable and error description
variable are populated only on failure of
fsockopen. $errno will contain the error number
and $errdesc will contain the error description
e.g. Server cannot be found.
*/
$fp = fsockopen( "www.example.com", 80, $errno,
$errdesc);

?>

Now that we have established a connection to the server at example.com let's close
the connection. You might be familiar with the fclose() function, we use this to close
the connection.

<?php

$fp = fsockopen( "www.example.com", 80, $errno,

$errdesc); //establish connection
fclose($fp); //close connection

?>

Now lets move on to more useful things related to sockets on the next page.

Sending The Request

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/76/1.html Page 2
 Using Sockets in PHP
by Andrew Walsh

In the following section you will learn how to send a request to a server and then list
how many lines the server returned for a particular page and then how to loop through
the returned array to display the page. Once you have a socket open to a server the
variable $fp or whatever you have called it acts like a file in many ways, meaning you
can send variables to $fp and return results.

<?php

/*
Once again we connect to the server at example.com
*/
$host = "www.example.com";
$page = "/index.html";
$fp = fsockopen($host, 80, $errno, $errdesc) or
die("Connection to $host failed");
/*
Now we define the headers to be sent to the server
GET means we want the page or we want the contents
of it. We can use POST to send variables to that
page and return the results as i will show you
later in this tutorial.
*/
$request = "GET $page HTTP/1.0\r\n";
$request .= "Host: $host\r\n";
$request .= "Referer: $host\r\n";
/*
Using fputs() we send the request to the server
and then loop through the results and form an
array called $page
*/
fputs($fp, $request);
while(!feof($fp)){
$page[] = fgets($fp, 1024);
}
/*
Close the connection and count how many lines the
server returned for a certain page
*/
fclose($fp);
echo "The server returned ".(count($page)).
" Lines";
/*
Loop through the page array and print each line to
the browser. Here we use the for() statement.
*/
for($i=0; $i<count($page); $i++){
echo $page[$i];
}

?>

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/76/1.html Page 3
 Using Sockets in PHP
by Andrew Walsh

That shouldn't of been too hard because after the initial connection and when we
returned the array with the request we only looped through the array and printed its
contents to the browser. In the next section I will show you a example of connecting to
multiple servers.

Searching for a Page

Right in this section I will show you an example that uses fsockopen() to connect to a
server. The example I will show you is how to connect to multiple webservers and
check if a certain page is on that server.

<?php

$servers = array(
"www.example.com" => "/index.html",
"www.example2.com" => "/index.php"
);
/*
loop through the servers array and then connect to
the host and return an error if fsockopen couldn't
connect to the server.
*/
foreach($servers as $host=> $page){
$fp = fsockopen($host,80,$errno,$errdesc,10);
echo "Trying $host<br>\n";
if(!$fp){
echo("couldnt connect to $host");
echo "<br><hr><br>\n";
continue;
}
/*
Print trying to get the page then define the
request and send it to the server
*/
echo "trying to get $page<br>\n";
$request = "HEAD $page HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n";
fputs($fp, $request);
/*
print the results to the browser
*/
echo fgets($fp, 1024);
echo "<br><br><br>\n";
/*
Once again close the connection with fclose()
*/
fclose($fp);
/*
Close the foreach loop
*/

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/76/1.html Page 4
 Using Sockets in PHP
by Andrew Walsh

?>

That piece of code will simply display something like this:

Trying: www.example.com
Trying to get: /index.html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

That will be displayed only if the page was found. 404 Not found will replace 200 OK if
the page wasn't found. You may recognize the 404 error as the exact same one as
seen in your browser if you go to a page that doesn't exist.
In the next section I will show you how to get whois results for a domain name using
fsockopen().

Whois Example
So you have learned how to connect to servers, fetch results, loop through results and
finally close connections. So I thought I would include a more practical example in this
section and I chose to do a whois example which connects to certain whois servers
and checks for a record for a certain domain.

<?php

extract($_POST);
function whois($domain,$ext){
$url=$domain.$ext;
/*
Use a switch() statement to determine which whois
server is the best to use for the entered domain.
*/
switch($ext){
case ".co.uk":
$whois = "whois.nic.uk";
break;
case ".com":
$whois = "whois.networksolutions.com";
break;
case ".fr":
$whois = "whois.nic.fr";
break;
case ".biz":
$whois = "whois.biz";
break;
default:
$whois = "whois.networksolutions.com";
}

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/76/1.html Page 5
 Using Sockets in PHP
by Andrew Walsh

if (trim($url) <> "") {

$url = trim($url);
/*
Open the connection to the above whois server
*/
$f = fsockopen($whois, 43, $errno, $errstr, 30);
if (!$f) {
echo "Connection To Server Failed ($errno)";
} else {
/*
Send the domain to the server and return the
results
*/
fputs($f, "$url\r\n");
print "<pre>\r\n";
while (!feof($f)) {
echo fread($f,128);
}
print "</pre>";
/*
Use fclose to close the connection to the whois
server
*/
fclose($f);
}
}else{
echo "Invalid domain entered";
}
}

?>

Notice I have written this code in a function so it is more practical and reusable than
the other examples in this tutorial. They can be coded up into a function with relative
ease.

Conclusion
By now if you have followed this tutorial stage by stage you should know how to:

·Connect To A Server Using Sockets

·Disconnect From a Server
·Send a request to a server
·List the number of lines returned by the server on a request

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/76/1.html Page 6
 Using Sockets in PHP
by Andrew Walsh

· Use sockets in a practical project like a whois look-up script

And you should now realise that sockets and connecting to servers is both useful to know
and easy to use.
About the Author
Andrew Walsh lives in the UK and is engaged in his secondary education. He wishes to
persue a higher education in computer studies. He started programming at the age of 13
years, currently he has knowledge of PHP/MySQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/76/1.html Page 7