I just hashed through this same problem from a beginner perspective and came up with this bare-bones script which will do what you want.
<?PHP
ob_start();
$buffer = str_repeat(" ", 4096)."\r\n<span></span>\r\n";
for ($i=0; $i<25; $i++) {
echo $buffer.$i;
ob_flush();
flush();
sleep(1);
}
ob_end_flush();
?>
Questions that you may ask could be here (about \r\n
) and here (about ob_flush()
). Hope that helps you out.