Streamer is an Object-Oriented API for PHP streams.

A stream is a flow of bytes from one container to the other. You already use streams a lot in PHP, for instance each time you load a file into memory (file_get_contents()). You should explicitly use streams each time that:

• You need to access data from a container, but you don't know the size of this container (e.g. reading from STDIN, or a web service using streaming)
• You need to start processing data from a container before the whole transfer is finished (e.g. start zipping a file before it's all in memory)
• You need to save time and memory

PHP has a very elaborate stream API ; unfortunately, it uses functions for most stream operations (except for wrappers - go figure). Streamer is a generic library focusing on offering an object-oriented API to streams, and only that.

Streamer is published on packagist.org, so you can add it to your composer.json file for an easy installation:

composer require fzaninotto/Streamer

or

{
    "require": {
        "fzaninotto/Streamer": "0.0.1"
    }
}

<?php
use Streamer\Stream,
	Streamer\FileStream,
	Streamer\NetworkStream;

// basic usage
$stream = new Stream(fopen('smiley.png', 'r'));
$image = '';
while (!$stream->isEOF()) {
  $image .= $stream->read();
}

// pipe dreams!
$stream1 = new Stream(fopen('smiley.png', 'r'));
$stream2 = new Stream(fopen('tmp.png', 'w'));
// copy the contents from the first stream to the second one
$stream1->pipe($stream2);

// factory
$fileStream = FileStream::create('smiley.png', 'r');
print_r($fileStream);

$networkStream = NetworkStream::create('tcp://www.google.com:80');
print_r($networkStream);

Streamer is heavily inspired by other Stream class implementations:

• Guzzle
• Joomla's Filesystem Stream
• Node.Js Stream API