What potential issues could arise when using fsockopen in PHP for connecting to an IRC server?

One potential issue that could arise when using fsockopen in PHP for connecting to an IRC server is the lack of error handling for failed connections. To solve this issue, you can implement error handling to check for connection errors and handle them accordingly.

<?php
$server = 'irc.example.com';
$port = 6667;
$timeout = 10;

$socket = @fsockopen($server, $port, $errno, $errstr, $timeout);

if (!$socket) {
    die("Failed to connect to IRC server: $errstr ($errno)");
}

// Continue with IRC server communication

fclose($socket);
?>