fsockopen()

fsockopen() — Open Internet or Unix domain socket connection.

fsockopen() — Initiates a socket connection to the resource specified by hostname.

The socket will by default be opened in blocking mode. You can switch it to non-blocking mode by using stream_set_blocking.

The function stream_socket_client is similar but provides a richer set of options, including non-blocking connection and the ability to provide a stream context.

Inputs: hostname: If OpenSSL support is installed, you may prefix the hostname with either ssl:// or tls:// to use an SSL or TLS client connection over TCP/IP to connect to the remote host. port: The port number. This can be omitted and skipped with -1 for transports that do not use ports, such as unix://. error_code: If provided, holds the system level error number that occurred in the system-level connect() call. If the value returned in error_code is 0 and the function returned false, it is an indication that the error occurred before the connect() call. This is most likely due to a problem initializing the socket. error_message: The error message as a string.

Returns: fsockopen returns a file pointer which may be used together with the other file functions (such as fgets, fgetss, fwrite, fclose, and feof). If the call fails, it will return false