Using sockets: Getting Articles from newsgroups (i)

By Armel Fauveau a wooden translation
PHP can open a socket port on a remote or local host. This article is a small example of using sockets: Connect to a Usenet newsgroup server, talk to servers, and download articles from newsgroups.

Open a socket in PHP
Use Fsockopen () to open a socket. This function can be used in both PHP3 and PHP4. The function declaration is this:
int Fsockopen (string hostname, int port [, int errno [, String errstr [, double timeout]]]
This function will open a TCP connection to port ports connected to the host hostname. Hostname can be a valid domain name, or an IP address. For UDP connections, you must specify the protocol: Udp://hostname. For UNIX domains, the host name uses the path to the socket, in which case port ports must be set to 0. The optional timeout parameter is used to set the time, in seconds, to wait for a socket to open.
For more information on fsockopen (), please refer to: http://www.php.net/manual/function.fsockopen.php

Network News Transfer Protocol
Access to a newsgroup server is required through a protocol called NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol). This agreement has detailed details in the rfc977 and can be obtained in http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc977/rfc977.html. This document describes how to connect to the NNTP server, how to talk to the server, and the different commands to complete these tasks.

Connection
Connecting to an NNTP server requires knowing its host name (or IP address) and the port it listens on. To avoid a connection attempt failure causing the program to hang, you should use the timeout parameter.
<?php
$cfgServer = "Your.news.host";
$cfgPort = 119;
$cfgTimeOut = 10;

Open a socket
if (! $cfgTimeOut)
Without timeout
$usenet _handle = Fsockopen ($cfgServer, $cfgPort);
Else
With timeout
$usenet _handle = Fsockopen ($cfgServer, $cfgPort, & $errno, & $errstr, $cfgTimeOut);

if (! $usenet _handle) {
echo "Connection failed.\n";
Exit ();
}
else {
echo "connected.\n";
$tmp = fgets ($usenet _handle, 1024);
}

?>