How to slowly echo out results

Question

Not sure if this is going to be possible with PHP but i id it by accident before and i forget how i did it, basically i had made a script that echo'd out a result but i added a u sleep between the three results and it made it so every like 1 second a result would be echo, i need to create a script to echo out a response every 3 seconds. Any tips? Sorry, I'm new to it. When i try the below code it doesn't work.

<?php
echo "test";
sleep(2);
echo "test2";
sleep(2);
echo "test2";
echo $answer;
?>

You can `flush()`, or use JavaScript to slowly append content. — Dave Chen, Sep 03 '14 at 21:13
this shouldn't be done on the server side since the operation isn't time consuming and just output your results slowly client side — vico, Sep 03 '14 at 21:16
Just makes the page execution time sleep. (Doesnt load the page for x time, x being the time of sleep you did.) @ScottLawson — Will Econ, Sep 03 '14 at 21:23
Flush seems to do the job, though.. I will probably do it client side. I just needed a refreshment on how to do it. — Will Econ, Sep 03 '14 at 21:23

score -1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 03 '14 at 22:27

The output will be buffered until the script ends or you flush() it manually.

<?php
echo "test";
sleep(2);
flush();
echo "test2";
sleep(2);
flush();
echo "next";

When run in cli, this is the best option. When run in browser, check if you're not better off using browser-based technologies like javascript to slowly display parts of the output.

How to slowly echo out results

1 Answers1