Temporary exit from a loop

Anon

I have a case where I need to pause a loop for a few seconds. The SLEEP() function does this well.

However, it appears that when in a loop, sleep() will not output anything, until the loop is completed. So, if there are 10 iterations in a loop, the result for each iteration doesn't get output to a webpage. Instead, it is stored until the loop completes. The whole result is then written to a webpage in a bunch.

What I need is to be able to output the result of each loop as it is executed, then sleep, then output next result, then sleep, etc.

Is there a way to break out of a loop, so that its result can be shown, then return to the loop where it left off?

TIA,
Richie.

Anon

Have you tried to use the Output Control Functions?
Ie:
flush — Flush the output buffer
ob_start — Turn on output buffering
ob_get_contents — Return the contents of the output buffer
ob_get_length — Return the length of the output buffer
ob_gzhandler — ob_start callback function to gzip output buffer
ob_end_flush — Flush (send) the output buffer and turn off output buffering
ob_end_clean — Clean (erase) the output buffer and turn off output buffering
ob_implicit_flush — Turn implicit flush on/off

Anon

But even if the output gets to the browser, it's up to the browser to display it or not. A XHTML-compliant (not sure about HTML4) browser will wait until it received the entire output before it displays it.

Diego

Anon

I am trying to do the exact opposite of what ob_* does. I need to display the result of each iteration of a loop, rather store all the iterations and display them as a bunch.

sarahk

I think Reto's point was that before you sleep you can do a flush to send data to the browser.

Anon

Hello,

Diego is right... it is up to your browser! I have the same problem (topic: PHP echo problem). Somebody told me i could try to exit the file, then reload it but with an offset how far down the loop i was, and then go on with the loop where i stopped.

I'm going to work on my problem, if I find a good solution I'll let u know...

Greetz,
Snafu