PHP File IO - How To Open Standard Output as a File Handle

If you want to open the standard output as a file handle yourself, you can use the fopen("php://stdout") function. It creates a special file handle linking to the standard output, and returns the file handle. Once the standard output is opened to a file handle, you can use fwrite() to write data to the starndard output like a regular file. Here is a PHP script example on how to write to standard output:

<?php
$stdout = fopen("php://stdout", "w");
fwrite($stdout,"To do:\n");
fwrite($stdout,"Looking for PHP hosting provider!\n");
fclose($stdout);
?>

This script will print:

What's your name?
To do:
Looking for PHP hosting provider!

If you don't want to open the standard output as a file handle yourself, you can use the constant STDOUT predefined by PHP as the file handle for standard output.

If you are using your script in a Web page, standard output is merged into the Web page HTML document.

print() and echo() also writes to standard output.