Escaping from HTML is a very cool feature of PHP because it allows easily to inject portions of dynamic content into predefined HTML template. But when you come to HTML tags with many dynamic attributes and relatively complex logic beyond them, this cool feature turns into complete disaster. If you constantly develop view templates or web page scripts then you definitely know how many times you hated starting yet another “<?php echo…” just for another attribute value.

Right, even if you strongly pretend to write clean code, multiple dynamic attributes per HTML tag, variable styles or class sets usually result in total mess of HTML and PHP which is very hard to read. This usually happens with form elements or jQuery widgets that require a lot of data converted into HTML attributes, classes and styles.
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Recently we found that our Zend Framework based application was running into infinite loop and terminated by execution timeout on some hostings. The problem was found in Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Socket class which uses stream_copy_to_stream if you configure Zend_Http_Client for writing data to stream.

The problem already was reported on ZF issue tracker but wasn’t fixed: http://framework.zend.com/issues/browse/ZF-9265.
It seems that the cause is a bug in stream_copy_to_stream that was fixed at some point during PHP 5.2.x development.

But as we need to run our code on virtually any hosting we decided to work around this problem by replacing stream_copy_to_stream with fread and fwrite in Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Socket code.
Notice that Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Curl is not affected by this problem as it uses internal code for writing to streams. Thus, switching to Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Curl sounds as the easiest solution. We added automatic switching to it by checking if ‘curl_init’ function exists and if so we use Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Curl as the adapter for Zend_Http_Client.