PHP Misspeak or Misunderstanding

[iwato]

BACKGROUND: Do people volunteer to write manuals, or are they drafted? This is a rhetorical question that need not be answered. It is a prologue to the following statement that I recently extracted from the Online PHP Manual."The socket_getpeername() function should not be used with AF_UNIX sockets created with socket_accept(). Only sockets created with socket_connect() or a primary server socket following a call to socket_bind() will return meaningful values."QUESTION: To the best of my knowledge the socket_accept() and socket_connect() functions do not create sockets; rather, they use socket resources that have already been created to perform special tasks at those sockets. If I am correct, and I am not insisting that I am, how might one interpret the above statement meaningfully?You know there comes a time when I just want to sock it! Roddy

[justsomeguy]

Not all connections are equal. The only situation where a meaningful peer name would be returned is a certain type of connection set up like they describe.

[jeffman]

I think part of what Roddy is saying is that socket_accept() and socket_connect() return resources, not sockets. OTOH, socket_create also returns a resource. Conflating a socket with a socket resource is harmless enough for everyday conversation between developers. It is probably a bit sloppy for a manual.Then again, we all do this sort of thing all the time, including the manual. When we say strpos takes a string as an argument, that's really just sort of true. You can pass it a string literal, and then it sort of makes sense to say you're passing it a string. But if you pass a string function a variable to which a string has been assigned, you're really not passing it a string at all. You're passing it a reference to a location in a lookup table that points to another location in RAM. But it would really get annoying if we always talked about passing a "string reference" instead of "string." And no one ever complains when the manuals discuss string variables as if they were identical with the data that they reference.I suppose a resource is a different kind of data, and as I said, probably the manual should be more specific. But I don't think interpreting the description meaningfully is very difficult here. Where the passage you quoted has "socket" read "socket resource."