gopher-php

gopher-php is a library that lets you read and parse Gopher files from PHP. This is a library that I wrote in order to write a blog via Gopher files, yet have the blog accessible via HTTP.

Since this library was written to suit my own specific needs, it is not feature complete in terms of Gopher support. The Gopher item types current supported are:

• links to text files (type 0)
• links to directories (type 1)
• HTTP URLs (type h, Gophernicus)
• informational lines (type i, Gophernicus)
• plain text items

There are classes to deal with Gopher proper as well as with "phlogs", blogs written and served via Gopher. The format is based upon the phlog system I use. More information on this below.

Usage

Gopher

In order to read and parse a Gopher file, simply instantiate a new GopherFile object, passing in the file name. This will populate the object with an array of GopherItem objects, which can be iterated over and content retrieved.

$gopherFile = new \Gopher\GopherFile('/path/to/gopher/file');
foreach ($gopherFile as $item) {
    if (null != $item->getUrl()) {
        echo 'Item is a link to ' . $item->getUrl() . ' with the label of '
           . $item->getText();
    } else {
        echo 'Item is a text item that says: ' . $item->getText();
    }
    echo PHP_EOL;
}

Phlog

As stated earlier, I wrote this library primarily to share my phlog (a blog hosted via Gopher) via HTTP. To achieve this, I wrote special classes for doing so. The way the phlog works is that there is a gophermap file which is basically the "home page", showing the first paragraph of each phlog entry with a link to read the entire post. You can read and parse this gophermap (referred to as a phlogmap) with the PhlogMapFile class. Similar to the GopherFile class, after parsing is complete, the PhlogMapFile will have an array of the entries in the phlogmap file. Each entry is stored as a PhlogEntry object, from which you can get the entry's title, body, footer, and date.

$phlogMapFile = new \Gopher\PhlogMapFile('/path/to/phlogmap');
foreach ($phlogMapFile as $entry) {
    echo 'Entry title: ' . $entry->getTitle() . PHP_EOL;
    echo 'Entry date: ' . $entry->getDate() . PHP_EOL;
    foreach ($entry->getBodyItems() as $item) {
        echo $tem->getText() . PHP_EOL;
    }
    echo 'Entry footer: ' . $entry->getFooter() . PHP_EOL;
}