Stream

Stream

InitPHP\HTTP\Message\Stream is the package's PSR-7 StreamInterface implementation. It powers every message body and the response body the PSR-18 Client hands back.

useInitPHP\HTTP\Message\Stream;

Construction

newStream($body = '', ?string $target = null);

Four input shapes are accepted for $body:

$body	What it means
string	Seeded literal bytes (most common).
resource	An already-open PHP stream handle, used directly.
Psr\Http\Message\StreamInterface	Contents are read and re-staged on the chosen backend.
null	Treated as an empty string.

And four $target choices that pick the backend:

$target	Backend	When to reach for it
'php://temp'	Memory, spills to disk past 2 MiB	Default for factories. Best general-purpose choice; cheap for small bodies, safe for large.
'php://memory'	Memory only	When you want to forbid disk spill (e.g. secrets).
null	Pure PHP string	Tiny bodies (canned error pages, reason phrases). Cheapest backend, no FD allocation.
(anything else)	Rejected (InvalidArgumentException)	The implementation refuses to open arbitrary URLs — pass php://* or null.

When $body is a resource, $target is ignored — the resource is wrapped as-is.

// php://temp — the default Factory choicenewStream('payload', 'php://temp');
// in-memory string backend, no FDnewStream('payload', null);
// already-open resource (e.g. a file)newStream(fopen('/var/files/report.pdf', 'rb'));
// from another StreamInterface (contents copied)newStream($otherStream);

Reading

$stream->getSize(); // ?int — null when not knowable (pipes, sockets)$stream->tell(); // int — cursor position$stream->eof(); // bool$stream->isReadable(); // bool$stream->isWritable(); // bool$stream->isSeekable(); // bool$stream->read(4096); // string — up to N bytes$stream->getContents(); // string — from cursor to EOF
(string) $stream; // string — full body (rewinds first if seekable)

getContents() raises RuntimeException on a detached/closed stream. __toString() does not — see "The __toString contract" below.

Writing

$stream->write('data'); // int — bytes written

write() follows fwrite() semantics on every backend: bytes are written at the current cursor (overwriting in place when the cursor is below EOF, extending when at or past EOF), and the cursor advances by the number of bytes written.

$stream = newStream('hello world', null);
$stream->seek(6);
$stream->write('there'); // 5
(string) $stream; // "hello there"$stream->tell(); // 11

v2 → v3 note: The legacy in-memory string backend (target = null) had two defects: when the cursor was at position 0 it prepended the payload instead of overwriting, and tell() always reported zero because the cursor was never advanced. Both are fixed in v3. See Migration Guide.

Seeking

$stream->rewind();
$stream->seek(0, SEEK_SET);
$stream->seek(-10, SEEK_END);

Seek raises RuntimeException on detached / non-seekable streams. The in-memory string backend supports SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END and clamps out-of-bound offsets to the buffer length.

Detach / close

$resource = $stream->detach(); // returns the underlying resource (or null)$stream->close(); // closes and forgets

For resource-backed streams, detach() simply unsets the wrapper's internal reference and returns the resource. For the in-memory string backend, detach()materialises the bytes into a fresh php://memory handle and seeks it to the same offset the in-memory cursor was sitting on:

$stream = newStream('abcdef', null);
$stream->seek(3);
$resource = $stream->detach();
ftell($resource); // 3stream_get_contents($resource); // "def"

After detach() / close(), calls on the wrapper that need the stream throw RuntimeException — except __toString(), which returns ''.

The __toString contract

PSR-7 mandates: __toString MUST NOT raise an exception. This package honours that hard requirement — every failure path returns the empty string:

$stream = newStream('payload', 'php://temp');
$stream->close();
echo (string) $stream; // "" — no exception, no warning

If you want a hard error on a broken stream, call getContents() directly — it still throws RuntimeException.

isEmpty() and isNotEmpty()

Two convenience predicates on top of the PSR-7 surface:

$stream->isEmpty(); // true iff size is known AND < 1$stream->isNotEmpty(); // true iff size is known AND > 0

Both return false for indeterminate streams (pipes, sockets, chunked HTTP responses with no Content-Length). The package will not lie about a stream whose size it cannot prove — callers must handle "I don't know" explicitly.

v2 → v3 note: v2's isEmpty() used getSize() < 1, which in PHP evaluates null < 1 to true and mis-classified every unknown-size stream as empty. The v3 behaviour is the strict "known-empty" check above.

Metadata

$stream->getMetadata(); // array — same shape as stream_get_meta_data()$stream->getMetadata('uri'); // mixed — single key

For the in-memory string backend, getMetadata() returns a minimal map (uri => null, seekable => false, eof => bool) — there's no real stream handle to interrogate.

Cloning preserves independence

When a PSR-7 message is cloned (via any with*() mutator), the body is cloned too:

• Resource backend — contents are read and copied into a fresh php://temp handle. The new wrapper is fully writable; the original is untouched.
• String backend — PHP's copy-on-write does the work. The two wrappers share the same string value until one of them writes.

The two streams are independent after the clone; writing to one does not mutate the other. See Overview & Immutability for the broader contract.

See also

• Recipe — Streaming Large Files for serving and consuming multi-MB payloads without loading them into RAM.
• UploadedFile — uses Stream internally for the moveTo() chunked copy path.