Flush() problem

Anon

In one of my scripts, I'm using the following code to put text on a browser with server push :

print ("\n--$end\n"); //start data block
print ("Content-type: text/html\n\n");
print ("<H1>This is output!</H1>"); // I'm using fgets and fputs here
print ("\n--$end\n");
flush ();
sleep (1);

When I execute this piece of code in a loop, the page doesn't refresh at al, but finally (after about "loop"*1 second) it refreshes "loop" times very quickly. When leaving the sleep function out, it refreshes during execution, but also too fast. Do I have to use another function (instead of flush()) to force the output to be sent to the browser before the sleep() function is executed?

Thank you

erebos

You shouldnt use sleep() to generate delayed print functionallity...it wont work.
If you hafto do that, make a function that uses the clock

ie:
function delaySeconds($sec)
{
//function that delays # of seconds
while($sec--)
{
$s = date("s", mktime() );
while ($s == date("s", mktime() ) )
{
//nothing
}
}

}

for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++)
{
echo "*";
flush();
delaySeconds(1);
}

Anon

The function works fine, but the output doesn't change. PHP still doesn't flush its data to the browser until the end of the script (and then flushes it all at once). I really need the page to reload the data (with server push) every second, so the user can actually follow the evolution of the output.

I'm using Apache under Win98, perhaps Windows doesn't support the timeout functions?

erebos

Correct, som configurations of php/apache isnt working the way one would like...
it overrides the flush function.