A call to function fsockopen to read the binary output of a CGI program yields packets duplication

Hello,

I'm trying to download the binary output of a CGI program from a PHP script using 'fsockopen'. My problem is that rather than receiving the proper sequence of binary data, I get the sequence by chunk, and I get some chunks several times. And this duplication happens in a random fashion, i.e. I never get the same output. (but the CGI always sends the same binary data (for the sake of testing)). Also, each chunk seems to be preceded by its size (written in HEX format using ASCII) and a CRLF.

e.g. If the CGI outputs a binary sequence of 256 bytes containing the sequence (0,1,2,3,4,5,...., 255), then my output could be like (61,13,10,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,13,10,...., 255,13,10,13,10) where 61 is ASCII A and A is HEXA for 10 and 10 is the size of the following packet. 13,10 are CRLFs.

There does not seem to be any byte remapping. So this is not about the encoding. It's really a matter of big chucks of data being sent several times.

See the PHP code I have below.

What I tried so far:
- Downloading the binary just by executing my CGI from a browser: it works like a charm.
- Downloading a binary file using the PHP script below: works like a charm.
- Downloading from the CGI output using the stream_get_contents() function: yields the same problem as described above (duplication + packet size)

Thanks for your help.

$ServerURL = 'http://127.0.0.1/testing/win2vo.cgi';
$url = parse_url($ServerURL);
 
// Eventually, this will be a more complex POST request
$request = "GET " . $url['path'] . " HTTP/1.1\n";
$request .= "Connection: Close\n";
$request .= 'Host: ' . $url['host'] . "\n\n";
 
// Eventually, "127.0.0.1" will be different so cannot assume it's local
if ($socket = fsockopen("127.0.0.1", 80, $err_num, $err_msg, 5))
{
	fwrite($socket, $request);
	
	$buffer = '';
	while (!feof($socket))
	{
		// print for testing purposes only
		print $buffer . "\n";
		$buffer .= fread($socket, 128);
	}
	
	fclose($socket);
 
	if ($houtput = fopen($BufferFileName, "wb"))
	{
		fwrite($houtput, $buffer);
		fclose($houtput);
	}
}

Select allOpen in new window