I can confirm this bug. I tried avoiding the chunking in Apache by using mod_deflate, but the PHP SOAP client probably doesn't send an Accept-Encoding header with gzip in it.

Please see related discussion:
http://marc.info/?t=123291993300002&r=1&w=2

See also bug report #43069 which actually caused this bug.

This bug has been fixed in CVS.

Snapshots of the sources are packaged every three hours; this change
will be in the next snapshot. You can grab the snapshot at
http://snaps.php.net/.
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.

This was fixed by introducing an 'dechunk' stream filter, see http://news.php.net/php.cvs/57042

I ran into this bug today myself, and after having compiled the latest snapshot as of 8:00pm CST 2009-05-16 I am still experiencing this error.

Have you tried to recompile PHP with --without-curlwrapper? I solved my case.

I can confirm the problem is still present in my PHP version 5.3.3 even after recompiling with changes made by Dmitry and with disabled curlwrapper. The problem breaks wsdls from yahoo i google APIs.

Workaround : Use a stream context specifying the protocol 1.0 of HTTP :

$opts = array('http' => array('protocol_version' => '1.0'));
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$this->client = new SoapClient($wsdl, array('stream_context' => $context));

After much head-scratching, I found the bug in the auto-decoding, which is actually independent of the SOAP wrapping, and occurs here: http://lxr.php.net/xref/PHP_MASTER/ext/standard/http_fopen_wrapper.c#774

The check looks for the exact line "Transfer-Encoding: chunked", but the number of spaces after the colon is arbitrary; thus any implementation that returns "Transfer-Encoding:  chunked" will not activate the "dechunk" filter.

You can reproduce this by pointing at an offending server with any stream wrapped function and enabling HTTP/1.1 (which is the default for SOAPClient, but not elsewhere):

<?php
$http_1_1_ctx = stream_context_create(["http" => ["protocol_version" => "1.1", "header" => "Connection: Close"]]);
file_get_contents($url, false, $http_1_1_ctx);
var_dump($http_response_header);

To test using the built-in web server:

# create file header-test.php
<?php
$spaces = str_repeat(' ', $_GET['s']);
header("Transfer-Encoding:{$spaces}Chunked");
echo "5\nHello\n0\n";

# Run server
php -S localhost:8080 header-test.php &

# Compare output with 1 vs 2 spaces

$http_1_1_ctx = stream_context_create(["http" => ["protocol_version" => "1.1", "header" => "Connection: Close"]]);
// Reports 'Hello', hides Transfer-Encoding header:
file_get_contents('http://localhost:8080/?s=1', false, $http_1_1_ctx);
var_dump($http_response_header);
// Reports raw chunk data, shows Transfer-Encoding header:
file_get_contents('http://localhost:8080/?s=2', false, $http_1_1_ctx);
var_dump($http_response_header);

I have submitted a Pull Request to make this detection handle any number of spaces in the HTTP header: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1902

Hopefully this will fix remaining instances of this bug.