HTTP Request, character encoding and fsockopen

Hi guys,

This is a weird problem, and I'm not sure if I got it right.

Just a practical example, that will describe my problem:

I'm connecting to google.com host on port 80 using fsock open, and I
send a regular GET header without any specific HTTP headers regarding
the type of encoding accepted, cookies, accepted charset, conditional
headers etc

What happens, is after sending the headers to this stream opened using
fsockopen, I start grabbing the headers, and then, comes the body of
the web page, everything seems logic until this point.

The problem is, just after the headers are received, the body of the
page, contains few odd alphanumeric values , about 4 elements in
length, and it seems it's a hexa value. e.g.. 2A, or two values
maybe: 8c9d... then comes the regular HTML code of the page if any.

At the end of the grabbed content, there's also one of these
alphanumeric groups, or a "0" (zero).

For some reason I tend to believe the characters right after the
headers are sent are used by browsers to identify the type of the
encoding of the stream? e.g. bytes that decide that my page is going
to come as UTF-8 encoding?

Anyways, the problem is, how to make sure I get the page right, and
why the file_Get_contents (url_goes_here) doesn't grab those
alphanumeric characters, considering they're stripping the returned
headers of the request already.

I am still thinking it's some sort of "stream's first byte" that
informs the app about the encoding of the content, but I'm here to
hear your input and solution on this.

Thank you,

Vladimir Ghetau

http://www.Vladimirated.com/

Re: HTTP Request, character encoding and fsockopen

Hi,

You could try using HTTP/1.0 or simply leaving off the HTTP version.

HTTP/1.1 clients must be able to handle "chunked transfer coding",
which is the encoding you're seeing. Each segment is preceded by it's
size in hex.

Details:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.6 .1

Peace,
John Peters

On Jan 19, 3:18 am, Vladimir Ghetau
wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> This is a weird problem, and I'm not sure if I got it right.
>
> Just a practical example, that will describe my problem:
>
> I'm connecting to google.com host on port 80 using fsock open, and I
> send a regular GET header without any specific HTTP headers regarding
> the type of encoding accepted, cookies, accepted charset, conditional
> headers etc
>
> What happens, is after sending the headers to this stream opened using
> fsockopen, I start grabbing the headers, and then, comes the body of
> the web page, everything seems logic until this point.
>
> The problem is, just after the headers are received, the body of the
> page, contains few odd alphanumeric values , about 4 elements in
> length, and it seems it's a hexa value. e.g.. 2A, or two values
> maybe: 8c9d... then comes the regular HTML code of the page if any.
>
> At the end of the grabbed content, there's also one of these
> alphanumeric groups, or a "0" (zero).
>
> For some reason I tend to believe the characters right after the
> headers are sent are used by browsers to identify the type of the
> encoding of the stream? e.g. bytes that decide that my page is going
> to come as UTF-8 encoding?
>
> Anyways, the problem is, how to make sure I get the page right, and
> why the file_Get_contents (url_goes_here) doesn't grab those
> alphanumeric characters, considering they're stripping the returned
> headers of the request already.
>
> I am still thinking it's some sort of "stream's first byte" that
> informs the app about the encoding of the content, but I'm here to
> hear your input and solution on this.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Vladimir Ghetau
>
> http://www.Vladimirated.com/

Re: HTTP Request, character encoding and fsockopen

Hello,

on 01/19/2008 06:18 AM Vladimir Ghetau said the following:
> I'm connecting to google.com host on port 80 using fsock open, and I
> send a regular GET header without any specific HTTP headers regarding
> the type of encoding accepted, cookies, accepted charset, conditional
> headers etc
>
> What happens, is after sending the headers to this stream opened using
> fsockopen, I start grabbing the headers, and then, comes the body of
> the web page, everything seems logic until this point.
>
> The problem is, just after the headers are received, the body of the
> page, contains few odd alphanumeric values , about 4 elements in
> length, and it seems it's a hexa value. e.g.. 2A, or two values
> maybe: 8c9d... then comes the regular HTML code of the page if any.
>
> At the end of the grabbed content, there's also one of these
> alphanumeric groups, or a "0" (zero).
>
> For some reason I tend to believe the characters right after the
> headers are sent are used by browsers to identify the type of the
> encoding of the stream? e.g. bytes that decide that my page is going
> to come as UTF-8 encoding?
>
> Anyways, the problem is, how to make sure I get the page right, and
> why the file_Get_contents (url_goes_here) doesn't grab those
> alphanumeric characters, considering they're stripping the returned
> headers of the request already.
>
> I am still thinking it's some sort of "stream's first byte" that
> informs the app about the encoding of the content, but I'm here to
> hear your input and solution on this.

Those are chunked transfer encoding blocks. You need to decode and
assemble the blocks. They are useful to know when the server response
has ended for responses with unpredicted length, like for instance those
generated by dynamically generated pages with PHP.

You may want to take a look at this HTTP client class to learn how to
decode them:

http://www.phpclasses.org/httpclient


--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

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