How to deal with streaming data in PHP?

php, streaming, twitter

Solution

fopen and fgets

<?php
$sock = fopen('http://domain.tld/path/to/file', 'r');
$data = null;
while(($data = fgets($sock)) == TRUE)
{
    echo $data;
}
fclose($sock);

This is by no means great (or even good) code but it should provide the functionality you need. You will need to add error handling and data parsing among other things.

Problem

There is a family of methods (birddog, shadow, and follow)in the Twitter API that opens a (mostly) permanent connection and allows you to follow many users. I've run the sample connection code with cURL in bash, and it works nicely: when a user I specify writes a tweet, I get a stream of XML in my console. My question is: how can I access data with PHP that isn't returned as a direct function call, but is streamed? This data arrives sporadically and unpredictably, and it's not something I've ever dealt with nor do I know where to begin looking for answers. Any advice and descriptions of libraries or pitfalls would be appreciated.

Original source