wrapper php,PHP: stream_wrapper_register - Manual

Use caution with writing code that may use stream wrappers with fread, as fread behaviour is 'inconsistent' with normal file operations because of the 8192 bytes internal buffer used by PHP ( >= 5.0.5 IIRC ).

ie:

fread($filehandle, filesize($filename))

will not work correctly if the file is larger than 8KB, it will only get you the first 8192 bytes. Also, it seems that:

fread($filehandle, 4096)

will still give you 8KB (if the file is larger than 8KB) as 8192 bytes is always passed to stream_read as count.

This makes it somewhat impossible to just 'drop in' a stream where normally a file would be used without taking special care.

Yes, it IS mentioned in the documentation here if you read it really well, but I for one spent some time scratching my head over it, and looking at the bug tracker, I am not the only one. The dev's say this inconsistancy is a feature though, even if it does make stream wrappers pretty much useless 'out of the box'.

file_get_contents and stream_get_contents seem to work ok though.