The gopher protocol, as defined by RFC 1436, is generally considered the ancestor of the modern HTTP protocol. However, gopher was also intended to provide references to non-gopher resources including telnet, wais, nntp, and even http. This extension adds gopher support to PHP's URL Wrappers, and provides a helper function gopher_parsedir() to make sense of gopher formatted directory listings.
Net_Gopher is installed through the usual PECL package installation process.
Prerequisite: PHP 4.3.0.
pear install Net_Gopher
Copy the resulting gopher.so to an appropriate location and add extension=gopher.so to your php.ini file or load it dynamically in your PHP script using dl("gopher.so");