dynamic loading?

[Anon]

Can someone provide a simple example of how to use dynamic loading (the dl() function) to access code outside of the core PHP library? Ie. loading and using a library written in C?

Or a link to a good on-line tutorial on this subject would be equally awesome!

Thanks,
Jeff

[Anon]

Usually you will use this to load extension modules for PHP. Let's assume that you compiled PostgreSQL support as a loadable module, e.g.

./configure --with-apxs --with-pgsql=shared

You will then get also "pgsql.so", and in the scripts where you need to use that, you will put at the beginning, so you can then use the pg_* functions:

<?php
dl("pgsql.so");
...
?>

Look also at the "extension_dir" config statement. I would recommend looking at the latest CVS manual where there is some more info.