Which do you use most and why: fsockopen, curl, fopen, file_get_contents

habbardone

Out of these, which one do you use most and why ?

fsockopen, curl, fopen, file_get_contents,

Out of these, which one do you use most and why ?

dagon

The question makes little sense, theses functions are not identical, I use what's appropriate to the task at hand.

habbardone

I have not said that they are identical !!! ?

Would appreciate any input for coders that do understand these.
methods: fsockopen, curl, fopen, file_get_contents.

There are many occasions when you can get your result
using 2 or 3 of these methods and you need to decide which
is the most appropiate one to select.

I have not used fsockopen, but the others I have used
and want to learn more from experienced coders.

Knowing the reasons for selecting one function over another
for a certain task will be helpful.

Perhaps I should have explained this in my first post 🙂

dagon

my mistake, i jumped the gun. My answer is still what ever is appropriate for the job, i can't see any other way to answer your query.

I guess i could search a few million lines of my code and count the occurrence of each, but i'm not sure that's very helpful. There are few things that cant be done a several different ways, in life and php.

A question like "In situation A .." which is the best choose, may get you what your after. If you want examples of each, the manual is usually the first place to go.

habbardone

I guess i could search a few million lines of my code

Yes , that would be helpful.

Let me know when you have done it 😉

Shrike

file_get_contents/file_put_contents with appropriate wrappers usually serves most purposes. There are times when they do not, operating on big files can be problematic, plus a real handle is useful sometimes when dealing with sockets - one example that springs to mind was reading from a socket into fgetcsv().

bpat1434

Personally I use them in the following ways:

fsockopen
[indent]Used to do a quick check for URLs and get response codes. Nothing fancy, but quick and dirty and I don't need CURL to do it. It's just a preference as I could easily use fopen with any of the stream wrappers instead of fsockopen.[/indent]

fopen
[indent]Personally I use this as writing strictly locally to files or output streams (like downloads).[/indent]

CURL
[indent]I use this only for times when I need to do http requests that somehow depend upon one another or have cookies. It's easier to use typically than strictly fsockopen or fopen.[/indent]

file_get_contents
[indent]I use this only when dealing with local files or a simple http read.[/indent]

Of course, all of these depend upon the situation I'm working in.