php websocket html5,php - Decoding network chars (HTML5 Websocket)

You have made one of the most common errors people make when they first start writing code that uses TCP -- you forgot to implement the protocol!

In your case, you forgot it in the server. The client already has a WebSocket implementation, and you request it by creating a 'MozWebSocket' object. The WebSocket specification says, "Each frame starts with a 0x00 byte, ends with a 0xFF byte, and contains UTF-8 data in between." Where's the code in the server to find the start of a frame and the end of a frame? Where the code to discard the 0xFF byte?

You actually have to implement the protocol. The protocol specification tells you how to decode the received data. (In your case, the data you are seeing as junk is most likely part of the protocol handshake -- the part that looks like ^n:ds[4U in this description of the handkshake phase.)

I'm pretty sure your method of invoking a PHP script to handle the WebSocket call through the web server will not work. That is, unless your web server knows how to do this -- WaterSpout and phpdaemon do.