Following up on this post from David Sklar, Mike Naberezny has come up with a few methods of his own to come up with his "thousand string concatenations".

It's been a while since David Sklar called out to let a thousand string concatenations bloom. That discussion produced some entertaining suggestions for putting strings together such as using preg_replace and calling out to MySQL with SELECT CONCAT.

Mike goes with a bit different media of choice - the filesystem functions and streams. One example opens a file, writes to the file then rewinds back to the beginning of the stream. He modified this to make it slightly more useful (writing to memory not the file system) and shows how it could be used to make a temporary stream for testing purposes.