setting the filepointer through a networ

[Anon]

Hello,
I'm hanging on a problem and don't know if threre's a solution anyway.
I tried to open mp3 files on external servers, set the filepointer to
'filesize - 128 Bytes' (because there's the trackinfo) and read to EOF.
Filesize() gives me null and fseek() says that the handler (i've created with
fopen(url)) is not valid. I guess that php cannot modifie the filepointer over TCP/IP.
Is that true?
Reading from the beginning would take too long.
Thanks.

Felix

[[deleted]]

filesize and fseek are filesystem functions, they don't work through http wrappers.
Use FTP.

[Anon]

filesize and fseek are filesystem functions, they don\'t work
through http wrappers. Use FTP.

Uhh, thanks for the instant answer. But can I use FTP on any server? I don\'t have any PWD or USER.

[[deleted]]

No, you can only use FTP on servers that run an FTP server.

[Anon]

If your server supports byte ranges (most do), you can send this HTTP request to retrieve what you want :

Range: bytes=-128

If you don't know how to use this, I'll give you some details. Das wird nur 30 DM kosten. Joking of course ;-)

[Anon]

Your solution sounds interesting. I've tried this one, but it did not work:

      $path = "blablabla";

      header("Range: bytes=-128");  
      $fd = fopen($path, "rb"); 

      $str = fread($fd, 128); // tried fgets, too.
      fclose($fd);

I've tried it on several servers and with different kinds of files.
The result was still the same -> the first 128 bytes.
It would be great if you could give me another hint.
Vielen Dank.

Felix

[Anon]

Ok, forget what I've posted before ;-)
Now my code looks like this and seems to work quite fine:
(just a rough outline of how it works, without errorhandling...)

 $url = parse_url($path);

 $sock = fsockopen($url["host"],80);

 if ($sock) 
 { 
   fputs($sock,"GET ".$url["path"]." HTTP/1.1\r\n"); 
   fputs($sock,"Host: ".$url["host"]."\r\n"); 
   fputs($sock,"Accept: */* \r\n"); 
   fputs($sock,"Range: bytes=-128\r\n"); 
   fputs($sock,"Connection: close\r\n\r\n"); 

   $response = fread($sock,4096); // quick-and-dirty

   fclose($sock); 
 } 

 echo $response;

Thanks for your help again.

Felix