Hi there... I wanted to fetch a webpage's contents. I used to be able to do so by fread'ing with a huge number as length:

//////////////////
$fp=fsockopen( $host, $port, $errno, $errstr, 120 ); 
// assumed host and port were previously defined
$headers = 
		"GET /jornalmn/index.htm HTTP/1.0\r\n"
		."User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)\r\n"
		."Host: www.meionorte.com\r\n"
		."Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*\r\n"
		."Connection: Keep-Alive\r\n"
		."Cache-Control: no-cache\r\n"
		."\r\n";

fwrite($fp,$headers, strlen($headers));
$fetched_content = fread($fp,1000000000);
fclose($fp);
////////////////

Just recently this stopped working. Actually, I would eventually fetch the page, but only after the connection timed out. After a lot of debugging I found out I'd have sucess by specifying the EXACT file size to fread. I had to adapt my scripts and tell them to either:

a) Capture the "Content-length" response value sent by the server (easy way);
b) Fread little by little (128 bytes a time) and use socket_get_status($fp) everytime to check for EOF condition and the number of unread bytes.