Help with .php files in Pset6 -> Load

Question

Me again, still in pset6, right now working on "load", I did this so far:

bool load(FILE* file, BYTE** content, size_t* length)
{ 
    fseek(file, 0, SEEK_END);
    long size = ftell(file);
    fseek(file, 0, SEEK_SET);
    *content = malloc(size);
    if (fread(*content, size, 1, file) == 0)
    {
        return false;
    }
    *length = size;
    return true;
}

and works fine with every file, except with .php files, when the client asks for a php "size" gets a value of -1 and I don't understand why, any help? Thanks guys!

Answer 1

You want function load() to work for both:

• files that have been opened by fopen()
• pipes that have been opened by popen()

I also did not manage to make it work by using fseek

I solved the problem by using fgetc(), reading all bytes one by one and at the same time counting them so that I could determine *length too in the end. The more bytes you read the more you realloc() the *content

Be careful of off-by-one errors.

Answer 2

I had the exact problem as you did. Then I learned that you can not use fseek() in a pipe, as pipe only allows one-way data flow (for more info, check out https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19187131/how-to-fseek-on-a-pipe).

I solved this problem by malloc() a rather large array, then fread() file into it. It might not be the best method, but I can not think of another way at the moment.