PHP file_get_contents() follow Content-length header

Question

i'm using code like this:

//section with the important stuff for the client
ob_start();
echo "Blah... Random Content" . rand(1,1000);
$size = ob_get_length();
header("Content-Length: $size");
header('Connection: close');
ob_end_flush();
ob_flush();
flush();
//all the following output/script running time should be ignored by the client (file_get_contents())
sleep(10);
echo "long action completed";

to output some content and subsequently running a time consuming background job.
In a other file i'm trying to access the data of the first script without having to wait for the background job to finish.
Unfortunately this here doesn't work for me:

$content = file_get_contents("http://some-address/thescript.php");
echo $content;

as it doesn't pay attention to the Content-length header. In the browser the whole thing works fine though. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Answer 1

Fixed it. In case anyone has the same problem:

$url = "http://some-adress/test.php";
$headers = get_headers($url, 1);
$content_length = $headers["Content-Length"];
$content = file_get_contents($url, NULL, NULL, NULL, $content_length);
echo $content;