cause of a nasty "couldn't build response" error

If you're trying to do PEAR::SOAP over HTTPS/SSL (with or without certificates), and you get a SOAP fault like this: soap_fault Object ( [error_message_prefix] => [mode] => 1 [level] => 1024 [code] => Parser [message] => couldn't build response [userinfo] => [callback] => ) and setting on curl verbosity shows you the curl_exec call is failing, and you instrument SOAP/Transport/HTTP.php to print out curl_errno and curl_error, and they show something like this ... * Closing connection #0 error is 18 transfer closed with -3 bytes remaining to read end-of-error What is happening is that you have trailing spaces after the closing ?> in your PEAR::SOAP service PHP file. Those extra spaces don't cause any problem during a normal http SOAP call, but when using https, they cause the above failure. I don't know whether this is a bug or a feature, but I wanted to post it for posterity. Jonathan Schilling Caldera/SCO jls@sco.com