Echo messages while php script still executes

Question

I have a php script that uses cURL and takes about 10-15 minutes to execute. What it does, it parses about 1000 pages looking for specific matches and throughout the script I ha

Answer 1

I'm using the @ob_flush() after every echo. In this example PHP_EOL creates a new line after $string

function output($string){
    echo $string.PHP_EOL;
    @ob_flush();
}

Answer 2

Use flush to immediately send output to the browser, by flushing the output buffer.

echo "foo";
flush();
echo "bar";
flush();

Answer 3

Basically, have your script write HTML output to a temporary log file. Then use ajax to periodically update the end-user's browser with the temporary log file. jQuery will make quick work of this.

Ajax is the only guaranteed way to get it to work on all browsers. Here is a quote from PHP's flush page.

flush() may not be able to override the buffering scheme of your web server and it has no effect on any client-side buffering in the browser. It also doesn't affect PHP's userspace output buffering mechanism. This means you will have to call both ob_flush() and flush() to flush the ob output buffers if you are using those.