output a echo message in the middle of a recursive function [duplicate]

This question already has an answer here:

I'm trying to build a simple crawler. The crawler is working fine but, I would like to output some messages inside the recursive function to get a an idea of how many pages that is left to crawl in the $crawling array and what page that's currently is getting crawled.

$crawling

Underneath is the relevant code. I have two echo's inside the function but, nothing is outputted before the script finishes. Is it possible to output messages along the way inside a recursive function?

$alreadyCrawled = array();
$crawling = array();

function followLinks($url) {
global $alreadyCrawled;
global $crawling;

echo "Now crawling: $url";

$parser = new DomDocumentParser($url);
$linkList = $parser->getLinks();

// Get the links
for($i = 0; $linkList->length > $i; $i++) {
$href = $linkList->item($i)->getAttribute("href");

// Convert relative links to absolute links
if(strpos($href, "#") !== false) {
continue;
} else if(substr($href, 0, 11) === "javascript:") {
continue;
} else if(substr($href, 0, 6) === "mailto") {
continue;
}

$href = createLink($href, $url);

// Crawl page
if(!in_array($href, $alreadyCrawled)) {
$alreadyCrawled = $href;
$crawling = $href;

getDetails($href);
}

}

array_shift($crawling); // Remove page just crawled

echo "Finished crawling: $url, Pages left to crawl: " . count($crawling);

// Crawl until array is empty
foreach ($crawling as $site) {
followLinks($site);
}

}


This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

consider flushing output, reference php.net/manual/en/function.flush.php
– nandal
Jun 29 at 8:11

1 Answer
1

After looking at nandal's answer and CBroe's link to a possible duplicate I ended up with the function underneath. Calling it after each echo does the trick.

function flush_buffers(){
ob_end_flush();
ob_flush();
flush();
ob_start();
}