Receives data from a connected socket

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- PHP Manual
- Socket Functions
- Receives data from a connected socket

# socket_recv

(PHP 4 >= 4.1.0, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

socket_recv — Receives data from a connected socket

### Description

socket_recv(
Socket `$socket`,
?string `&$data`,
int `$length`,
int `$flags`
): int|false

The socket_recv() function receives `length` bytes of data in `data` from `socket`. socket_recv() can be used to gather data from connected sockets. Additionally, one or more flags can be specified to modify the behaviour of the function.

`data` is passed by reference, so it must be specified as a variable in the argument list. Data read from `socket` by socket_recv() will be returned in `data`.

### Parameters

`socket`

  The `socket` must be a Socket instance previously created by socket_create().

`data`

  The data received will be fetched to the variable specified with `data`. If an error occurs, if the connection is reset, or if no data is available, `data` will be set to `null`.

`length`

  Up to `length` bytes will be fetched from remote host.

`flags`

  The value of `flags` can be any combination of the following flags, joined with the binary OR (`|`) operator.

  Possible values for `flags`
  Flag | Description
  --- | ---
  `MSG_OOB` | Process out-of-band data.
  `MSG_PEEK` | Receive data from the beginning of the receive queue without removing it from the queue.
  `MSG_WAITALL` | Block until at least `length` are received. However, if a signal is caught or the remote host disconnects, the function may return less data.
  `MSG_DONTWAIT` | With this flag set, the function returns even if it would normally have blocked.

### Return Values

socket_recv() returns the number of bytes received, or `false` if there was an error. The actual error code can be retrieved by calling socket_last_error(). This error code may be passed to socket_strerror() to get a textual explanation of the error.

### Changelog

Version | Description
--- | ---
8.0.0 | `socket` is a Socket instance now; previously, it was a resource.

### Examples

Example #1 socket_recv() example

This example is a simple rewrite of the first example from Examples to use socket_recv().

    <?phperror_reporting(E_ALL);echo "<h2>TCP/IP Connection</h2>\n";/* Get the port for the WWW service. */$service_port = getservbyname('www', 'tcp');/* Get the IP address for the target host. */$address = gethostbyname('www.example.com');/* Create a TCP/IP socket. */$socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, SOL_TCP);if ($socket === false) {    echo "socket_create() failed: reason: " . socket_strerror(socket_last_error()) . "\n";} else {    echo "OK.\n";}echo "Attempting to connect to '$address' on port '$service_port'...";$result = socket_connect($socket, $address, $service_port);if ($result === false) {    echo "socket_connect() failed.\nReason: ($result) " . socket_strerror(socket_last_error($socket)) . "\n";} else {    echo "OK.\n";}$in = "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\n";$in .= "Host: www.example.com\r\n";$in .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";$out = '';echo "Sending HTTP HEAD request...";socket_write($socket, $in, strlen($in));echo "OK.\n";echo "Reading response:\n\n";$buf = 'This is my buffer.';if (false !== ($bytes = socket_recv($socket, $buf, 2048, MSG_WAITALL))) {    echo "Read $bytes bytes from socket_recv(). Closing socket...";} else {    echo "socket_recv() failed; reason: " . socket_strerror(socket_last_error($socket)) . "\n";}socket_close($socket);echo $buf . "\n";echo "OK.\n\n";?>

The above example will produce something like:

    <h2>TCP/IP Connection</h2>
    OK.
    Attempting to connect to '208.77.188.166' on port '80'...OK.
    Sending HTTP HEAD request...OK.
    Reading response:

    Read 123 bytes from socket_recv(). Closing socket...HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:56:36 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
    Last-Modified: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:24:10 GMT
    ETag: "b80f4-1b6-80bfd280"
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    Content-Length: 438
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

    OK.