Executing a PHP from within another PHP

[Anon]

Hi
I am designing a registration program that is attempting to to the following. It all needs to happen inline from the same PHP file.

1. Register a user into a "user" database
2. Submit a form to a .cgi of a third party product using its API. This .cgi makes changes to a "product" database
3. Access the new details in the "product" database and copy certain values back to the "user" database.

My problem is that I have designed a simple page that will automatically submit the form to the .cgi and it works when called directly. However, I want to execute this file from within my main PHP file and ensure that it has finished executing before continuing with the registration.

I have attempted to use lynx to execute the file however I need to pass values to the file and lynx seems to choke on the query string which appears like this

http://www.mainstreet.au.com/test/test.php3?username=testing&password=tesst&sitename=testing&email=[e-mail]&quota=4096

The important part of the main file is included below

if (!mysql_select_db($user, $db)) {
fncend("Error selecting database '$user':<BR><BR>" .
mysql_errno() . ": " . mysql_error() . "<BR>");
}
$result = mysql_query("SELECT uname FROM user WHERE uname = '$username'");
if (!mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
// first time -> the user should be added

	//generate password
	$password = password(7);

	//run new script to add to product
	$commandline = "lynx http://www.mainstreet.au.com/temp/test.php3?username=$username&password=$password&sitename=$sitename&email=$email&quota=$quota";
	// strip out possible nasty stuff and run
	$commandline = chop(str_replace('\(','(',str_replace('\)',')',str_replace('\*','*',escapeshellcmd($commandline).' '))));
	//$commandline = escapeshellcmd($commandline);
	//echo $commandline;
	Exec($commandline) or fncend("Error adding user '$username' to '$product' database.");


	//query product for password, created, url etc
	$sql="SELECT url, pword, created FROM user WHERE uname='$username'";
	//echo $sql;
	$query2 = mysql_query($sql);	etc...

[Anon]

You don't need to use lynx to execute an external URL; use one of the file functions to do so.

$foo = implode("",file("http://www.mainstreet.au.com/temp/test.php3?username=$username&password=$password"));

Now $foo contains the response from your remote server.

The implode() function is used to combine the results of file() (an array) into a single string.