A function to get a remote file and return it's contents, instead of saving to a local file, was missing - here it is:
function ftp_fetch($ftp_stream, $remote_file) {
ob_end_flush();
ob_start();
$out = fopen('php://output', 'w');
if (!ftp_fget($ftp_stream, $out, $remote_file, FTP_ASCII)) die('Unable to get file: ' . $remote_file);
fclose($out);
$data = ob_get_clean();
return $data;
}
It works the same as ftp_get(), but instead returns the contents of the remote file - for example:
$ftp = ftp_connect('my.server.com', 21, 60);
ftp_login($ftp, 'username', 'password');
$data = ftp_fetch($ftp, 'path/to/remote.file');
echo $data;
Note, I use it to fetch text-files from a server - if you need to fetch binary files, change FTP_ASCII to FTP_BINARY .. but most likely, getting files to memory is only useful for smaller files, e.g. plain text, xml, etc.
