Headline grabber optimization.

Anon

Hi,

I'm building a headline grabber based on the following snippet:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=34

My first question concerns this line of code:
$myLine.=fgets($myFile,255);

What does the "." mean? How about the "255"? Is there anyway to speed up this process (like only grab the file up until it hits the END OF HEADLINES string??). It seems terribly slow when pulling stuff out of ten different sites.

Finally; in PHP how do I make echoed html appear progressively? At the moment it will only display the output once the entire process is finished.

Thanks in a advanced.
Guy.

Anon

Do not know about the "." unless it is an incrementer?? guessing!

But the 255 is "read 255 bytes" you can set this to any size (32Kb is perhaps a good upper limit) - SO you are grabbing the data from the file 255 bytes at a time , increase this to 4096 and you should see a difference.

Alternately grab the whole file at once <?$myCache=fgets($myFile,32000);?> fclose() the connection, and read from $myCache in whatever sized chunks you require, this also helps avoid timeouts screwing with your script.

As to the last bit PHP is Serverside - so the whole file is parsed to HTML and then displayed, if you want a dynamic 'feel' you will need to cheat using a javascript timeout or use frames and forms to pass the data from your (constantly refreshing) php file to the form output.

Anon

The ".=" is for concatenating the string.

ie.

$string .= $add_more;

is the same as

$string = $string . $addmore;

To get your echoed lines to go out before finishing the parsing of the page try the flush(); function. It may or may not help you. If you're whole page is in tables, the browser will still not neccesarily display what it has been sent.

Have fun,

Brian

Anon

In addition to what Brian said, you should considr caching the results for better performance. Take a look here:

http://yelvington.com/headlines.php3

I use this module on my personal homepage to grab headlines (in rss format) from several external sources.