socket makes browser hang...

Posted on 16th Feb 2014 by admin

I have a socket server, and I am having a problem at the moment...

A browser sends a http header request to the server, but... some browsers send one request for one file, and others want 2. For example, Google Chrome asks for two parts: The headers, and the post data.

Whereas Firefox sends it all at once.

Chrome Part 1:
Code: POST /postdata.php HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:3333
User-Agent: Some Chrome string here
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://localhost:3333/postdata.php

Chrome Part 2:
Code: ------WebKitFormBoundaryHigb2TwanNRf4WQK
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name"

ryan
------WebKitFormBoundaryHigb2TwanNRf4WQK
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="comment"

hello
------WebKitFormBoundaryHigb2TwanNRf4WQK
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myFile"; filename="test.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

hello! This is a test document!
Line 2
Line 3

Line 5
Line 6


End File!
------WebKitFormBoundaryHigb2TwanNRf4WQK
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="submit"

Post It!
------WebKitFormBoundaryHigb2TwanNRf4WQK--

Firefox Whole thing:
Code: POST /postdata.php HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:3333
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://localhost:3333/postdata.php
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------491299511942
Content-Length: 566

-----------------------------491299511942
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name"

ryan
-----------------------------491299511942
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="comment"

adfafqa
-----------------------------491299511942
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myFile"; filename="test.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

hello! This is a test document!
Line 2
Line 3

Line 5
Line 6


End File!
-----------------------------491299511942
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="submit"
Now the problem is that since firefox sends it once, my code makes Firefox hang because I have two socket_recv() one for the headers, and one for the post data, where the second socket_recv() just sits and waits but nothing is sent to it. In Chrome this works just fine, because data is send at two different times (headers and post data).

I don't really want to write code that checks a browser to see what the browser is and do something according the browser type, so is there a better way then what I have to get the data no matter what browser the user is using, and the code doesn't hang if the browser only sends headers once?

socket_recv($client, $headers, $max_post_size, 0);
if(preg_match("~^POST~", $headers)){
socket_recv($client, $post, $max_post_size, 0);
}else{
$post = '';
}