Question

This is probably impossible but i thought i would ask around and see if i missed something. What im looking for is a way of using functions that require file pointer handle without the need to write an actual file.

I know i could use a temporary file, do my operations then read the file back into the output buffer and delete the file. However this means latency from writing to disk then reading from the disk. It would be far better for speed and resources in my case if i could just do something like

$tmp = createFakeFile();
fputscsv($tmp, array(/*** an array of csv fields ***/));
echo $tmp;

I doubt this exists but if you’ve ever heard of a way of doing something like this i’d love to hear about it

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use php://memory and php://temp wrapper files for this.

Cite:

php://memory and php://temp are read-write streams that allow
temporary data to be stored in a file-like wrapper. The only
difference between the two is that php://memory will always store its
data in memory, whereas php://temp will use a temporary file once the
amount of data stored hits a predefined limit (the default is 2 MB).
The location of this temporary file is determined in the same way as
the sys_get_temp_dir() function.

The memory limit of php://temp can be controlled by appending
/maxmemory:NN, where NN is the maximum amount of data to keep in
memory before using a temporary file, in bytes.

http://php.net/manual/en/wrappers.php.php