Resource

A resource is a special variable, holding a reference to an external resource. Resources are created and used by special functions. See the appendix for a listing of all these functions and the corresponding resource types.

Note: The resource type was introduced in PHP 4

Converting to resource

As resource types hold special handlers to opened files, database connections, image canvas areas and the like, you cannot convert any value to a resource.

Freeing resources

Due to the reference-counting system introduced with PHP 4's Zend Engine, it is automatically detected when a resource is no longer referred to (just like Java). When this is the case, all resources that were in use for this resource are made free by the garbage collector. For this reason, it is rarely ever necessary to free the memory manually by using some free_result function.

Note: Persistent database links are special, they are not destroyed by the garbage collector. See also the section about persistent connections.

User Contributed Notes
Resource

evildictaitor at hotmail dot com
16-Aug-2004 01:25


In response to yasuo_ohgaki, the reason for the inability of the $_SESSION[] variable to hold references is because a session is just a serialize()'d version of it's member variables saved under a unique filename, with this filename following the user around.



$_SESSION[] is therefore limited by the constraints of the serialize() function



Although this is not <i>strictly</i> true, ($_SESSION does some handling to convert messy variables (e.g. "s and ;s)) it cannot store resources due to the serialise() function's dependancy

isaac at chexbox dot com
22-Jun-2002 04:37


For the the oblivious: An example of a resource would be a mysql database connection.



$result = mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "pass");

//$result variable is a resource.



print $result;

//will print: Resource ID#1, or something similar

yasuo_ohgaki at hotmail dot com
20-May-2001 05:04


Resource type values are not saved in session variables. (Programmer must re-initialize resource type in session var anyway, because values held by resources are useless connection to connection)