Illegal character 0x0 when trying to delete more than 200 rows

Question

I'm using salesforce's PHP SOAP client (SforceBaseClient) to attempt to delete records. It's working fine for less than 200 at a time, and I remember reading that you are limited to 200 rows at a time.

So, in a flash of imagined brilliance, I created a loop to step through batches of 200 records. The first batch works fine. But when it loops and tries to delete the second batch, I get the "Illegal character 0x0" error.

Later, I realized that the delete() method in the SF SOAP client does exactly the same thing:

/**
 * Deletes one or more new individual objects to your organization's data.
 *
 * @param array $ids    Array of fields
 * @return DeleteResult
 */
public function delete($ids) {
  $this->setHeaders("delete");
  if(count($ids) > 200) {
    $result = array();
    $chunked_ids = array_chunk($ids, 200);
    foreach($chunked_ids as $cids) {
      $arg = new stdClass;
      $arg->ids = $cids;
      $result = array_merge($result, $this->sforce->delete($arg)->result);
    }
  } else {
    $arg = new stdClass;
    $arg->ids = $ids;
    $result = $this->sforce->delete($arg)->result;
  }
  return $result;
}

This should make it far easier; all I should have to do is call this method and pass it the complete array of IDs that I want to delete. Right?

...Except it gives me the very same error after processing 200 records.

Has anybody run into this and have a solution?

---

Clarification -- This has nothing to do with record #201; if I call this method twice with only 1 record, it fails on the second call.

Answer 1

The illegal character is a null response.

The issue is that for some reason my production environment keeps losing the soap connectivity. Each call to a SOAP method seems to log out.

My temporary solution is to chunk the data and connect/log in on each iteration.