This paragraph is confusing:
socket_read() returns the data as a string on success, or FALSE on error (including if the remote host has closed the connection). The error code can be retrieved with socket_last_error(). This code may be passed to socket_strerror() to get a textual representation of the error.
Note: socket_read() returns a zero length string ("") when there is no more data to read.
My tests (on PHP 5.1.4) show that when you socket_read() on a shutdown-socket, it returns FALSE when using PHP_NORMAL_READ, but returns "" when reading in PHP_BINARY_READ.
