Stream

composer require quillstack/stream

PackagistSourcePHP ^8.1

The simple implementation of PSR-7: Stream.

A request has a body, and so does a response. Sometimes that body is a file on disk, sometimes it is whatever was sent to the process, and very often there is none at all. Three streams rather than one, so the empty case costs nothing and the reading cases are honest about what they can and cannot do.

Why this exists

Most PSR-7 implementations have one stream class, built over a PHP resource — usually php://temp, which spills to disk once it grows past a couple of megabytes. It handles everything, which means every string you wrap goes through fwrite, fseek and ftell to be read back.

This has four small ones instead, each doing a single thing: a string being read, a file being read, a body being sent, and nothing at all. A body that is already a string in memory does not need a file handle to be read back, and most bodies in an API are already a string in memory — see the benchmark.

A file still gets a file: FileStream reads a nineteen-megabyte body without loading it, the same as everybody else's does.

Requirements

• PHP 8.1 or newer

Installation

composer require quillstack/stream

Usage

The body of a request

InputStream reads php://input, which is what a request arrives in:

use Quillstack\Stream\InputStream;

$stream = new InputStream();
$body = (string) $stream;

A file

use Quillstack\Stream\FileStream;

$stream = new FileStream('/var/www/files/report.pdf');

$stream->getSize();      // bytes
$stream->read(1024);
$stream->rewind();
$stream->getContents();

The handle is closed when the stream is, and when it goes out of scope.

A body being sent

use Quillstack\Stream\TextStream;

$stream = new TextStream(json_encode(['hello' => 'world']));

InputStream does the same thing, but it is named for where a request arrives from and a body being sent somewhere is not that.

No body at all

use Quillstack\Stream\EmptyStream;

$stream = new EmptyStream();

(string) $stream;        // ''
$stream->getSize();      // 0
$stream->eof();          // true

Nothing is opened, so a response which has no body pays nothing for having one.

Reading

read($length) takes what was asked for and leaves the rest; getContents() is what is left of the stream from where the reader has got to; __toString() is always the whole thing:

$stream = new TextStream('abcdef');

$stream->read(3);        // 'abc'
$stream->tell();         // 3
$stream->getContents();  // 'def'
$stream->eof();          // true
(string) $stream;        // 'abcdef', wherever the reader is

Reaching for a body twice is what __toString() is for — reading the contents twice reads them once, which is what PSR-7 means by it.

A stream over a string is seekable, because a string held in memory is.

Technical documentation

All three implement Psr\Http\Message\StreamInterface, so anything taking a PSR-7 stream takes any of them.

Class	What it reads
InputStream	php://input — the body of the request being handled, or a string given to it
TextStream	a string somebody already has, on its way out
FileStream	a file on disk, opened when the stream is built
EmptyStream	nothing; every read is empty and every size is zero

Asking a stream for something it cannot do throws rather than answering wrongly:

Exception	Thrown when
StreamNotReadableException	reading a stream which is not readable
StreamNotWritableException	writing to a stream which is not writable
StreamNotSeekableException	seeking a stream which cannot seek

All three extend StreamException, so one catch covers the lot.

Benchmark

Measured with quillstack/benchmark on a body of 880 bytes — the size of a small JSON response — created and read back in full. Runs are interleaved, each figure is the median of five, and PHP is 8.5.7.

	Version
quillstack/stream	v0.8.0
nyholm/psr7	1.8.2
guzzlehttp/psr7	2.13.0
laminas/laminas-diactoros	3.8.0

	Per body	Relative	Memory
quillstack/stream	1.12 µs	—	28 kB
nyholm/psr7	5.81 µs	5.2×	56 kB
guzzlehttp/psr7	6.92 µs	6.2×	116 kB
laminas/laminas-diactoros	7.99 µs	7.1×	47 kB

The five-fold difference is the design, not the code. The other three write the string into a php://temp resource and read it back out through the filesystem layer; this one keeps it as a string, because it already was one. Their single class covers files, sockets and strings alike; here a file gets FileStream, which behaves exactly as theirs do:

Reading the first 16 bytes of a 19 MB file	Peak memory
quillstack/stream, FileStream	730 kB
nyholm/psr7	731 kB
laminas/laminas-diactoros	730 kB
guzzlehttp/psr7	781 kB

Nobody loads the file. What this trades away is one class that does everything — if you need a stream over a socket, a compressed resource or anything else PHP can open, theirs takes it and this one does not.

Tests

composer test

The rest of Quillstack

This is one component of Quillstack, a PHP framework which is as simple to use as it is strict about what it does.

• quillstack/response — what carries one back
• quillstack/server-request — what carries one in
• quillstack/http-client — what sends one out
• quillstack/uri — the other half of a PSR-7 message

License

MIT. See LICENSE.