HTTP retrieval problems

[airborne]

I'm writing a php page which retrieves the source code from 9 pages and parses out a particular part of them to build my page. Basically it gets the latest comic from 9 online comics.

I reset the timeout timer to 15 seconds with set_time_limit(15) for each comic, to give them all their fair chance, but if any of them time out it aborts the whole script.

The problem is, I DO keep track of how long each comic takes to process, but the processing time is all in a file() statement, so I can't do my own little timeouts.

My main goal is to let a single comic time out without destroying the page, just display a "timed out" message for that comic.

Do I have to write my own error handling? It seems like such a chore.

Thanks guys/gals!

[chaostik]

Hi Aaron,

Neither file() or fopen() support setting timeouts on their reads. Unfortunately you'll have to use fsockopen() and get involved with the nuts & bolts of HTTP. Something like this:

<?
$fp = fsockopen("www.comicsite.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 15); // Note the 15 here is the timeout in seconds
if( !$fp ) {
echo "$errstr ($errno)<br>\n";
} else {
fputs ($fp, "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n");
while (!feof($fp)) {
$page_content .= fgets ($fp,128);
}
fclose ($fp);
}

// Do your parsing on $page_content here
?>

Hope that helps. I can't do too much detail because I don't know exactly what you are doing. One thing to note is that set_time_limit() is a timeout for the whole script, not for any particular function calls. Therefore, you'll have to make sure it is at least as high as the sum of all the fsockopen() timeouts on your page, plus a bit for overhead.

All the best,

Louis