Calling a specific function on php 5.2.17 under OS X gives an empty response to the browser. Why?

Question

PHP

The function is like this:

function strip_nonUtf8($str) {
    static $fourbytes = '[\n\t\r\x20-\x7f]|[\xc2-\xdf][\x80-\xbf]|\xe0[\xa0-\xbf][\x80-\xbf]|[\xe1-\xef][\x80-\xbf][\x80-\xbf]|\xf0[\x90-\xbf][\x80-\xbf][\x80-\xbf]|[\xf1-\xf7][\x80-\xbf][\x80-\xbf][\x80-\xbf]';

    $result = '';
    while (strlen($str) > 2000) {
        if (!preg_match("/^($fourbytes){100}/", $str, $match)) {
            if (preg_match("/^($fourbytes)*/", $str, $match)) {
                $result .= $match[0];
                $str = substr($str, strlen($match[0]));
            }
            // now the first character is bad
            $str = substr($str, 1);
            continue;
        }
        $result .= $match[0];
        $str = substr($str, strlen($match[0]));
    }
    if ($str != '' && preg_match_all("/($fourbytes)+/", $str, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER)) {
        $result .= join('', $matches[0]);
    }
    $result = strip_tags($result);
    return $result;
}

The error is (Chrome):
Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data.
Apparently the function interrupts the execution of the script.

Answer 1

bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52818
bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=45735

Answer 2

Googled? The first link leads here

Answer 3

This is not a browser issue. I gave the Chrome error as an example of an empty response from a web server.

Answer 4

Have you tried running this code on 5.3.19 or 5.4.9?