PHP Cookbook

18.19. Writing to Many Filehandles Simultaneously

Problem

You want to send output to more than one file handle; for example, you want to log messages to the screen and to a file.

Solution

Wrap your output with a loop that iterates through your filehandles, as shown in Example 18-4.

Example 18-4. pc_multi_fwrite( )

function pc_multi_fwrite($fhs,$s,$length=NULL) {
  if (is_array($fhs)) {
    if (is_null($length)) {
      foreach($fhs as $fh) {
        fwrite($fh,$s);
      }
    } else {
      foreach($fhs as $fh) {
        fwrite($fh,$s,$length);
      }
    }
  }
}

Here’s an example:

$fhs['file'] = fopen('log.txt','w') or die($php_errormsg);
$fhs['screen'] = fopen('php://stdout','w') or die($php_errormsg);

pc_multi_fwrite($fhs,'The space shuttle has landed.');

Discussion

If you don’t want to pass a length argument to fwrite( ) (or you always want to), you can eliminate that check from your pc_multi_fwrite( ). This version doesn’t accept a $length argument:

function pc_multi_fwrite($fhs,$s) {
  if (is_array($fhs)) {
    foreach($fhs as $fh) {
      fwrite($fh,$s);
    }
  }
}

See Also

Documentation on fwrite( ) at http://www.php.net/fwrite.