php-4.3.0pre2, fgets and socket_get_status

An application I am developing contains something like the following: $this->socket = fsockopen($server, $port, $errnum, $errstr, "60"); ... while (!feof($this->socket)) { $char = fgets($this->socket,1); if (($char == "\n") || ($char == "\r")) return $buffer; } $buffer .= $char; } return $buffer; This works fine upto php-4.2.x. However, I've recently built and installed php-4.3.0pre2 and now the above code appears to hang. Substituting fread in place of fgets solves the problem. I know that fgets is supposed to be 'binary safe' as of php-4.3 but I'm not sure if this could be causing the above problem. Does anyone know of any changes to fgets in php-4.3.0 which might be causing this? Are there any reasons why I should not use fread instead of fgets here? Also, I am looking at using something like: $status = socket_get_status($this->socket); if ($status["unread_bytes"] <= 0) return false; However, $status["unread_bytes"] always returns 0 until the first call to fgets($this->socket). Is this right? I'd like to check the status of the socket before I try to read from it. Thanks, Stephen Grier