bang statement for PHP in CGI mode

Anon

I administer two different PHP sites residing on two different servers, one running PHP as an Apache module and the other in CGI mode. Obviously the files on the CGI server must have the #!/usr/local/bin/php statement at the top and be executable whereas the Apache module site does not. Both sites are very similer in basic design concept and layout. They both use templates that format pages based on inherited varibales via URLs. For example the page "index.php" is the main template for the whole site which has a space between the header and footer areas that reads:

<? include "$page.php" ?>

When a user points to http://www.domain.com/index.php?page=products, they see the template page with all of the content from "products.php" properly formatted in the right place. Simply enough?

The CGI site has the #!/usr/local/bin/php statement at the top of the template page but not in the actual content pages because the content pages are included from the template page.

For organizational sake, I have named each content page the same name as the variable that is to be passed to the template (ie. "products.php", "contact.php", etc.).

With this desgin concept I have run into a problem with the PHP CGI site. When a user points directly to a content page (like "products.php" after entering a product name in my search engine) they see the content without all of the formatting (since the template had not been included). To fix this I just figured I would add some conditional logic at the top of each content page like this:

<?
if (!(isset ($page)))
{
$filename = strrchr ($PHP_SELF, '//');
$filename = substr ($filename, 1);

$ext = strrchr ($filename, '.');
$ext_length = strlen ($ext);
$filename = substr ($filename, 0, -$ext_length);

$page = $filename;

echo "

This code figures out what the $page variable is based on the name of the file ($filename minus the extention) and does an html redirect to the correct page. This all works fine on the Apache module site but on the CGI the content pages fail since they don't have the #!/usr/local/bin/php statement. If I add #!/usr/local/bin/php to each content page it will be echoed back to the browser since it it in the middle of the <body> tag.

I realize that a database is a more elegant way to handle this problem but that is not an option on either of the servers.

Any ideas?
thank you in advance.

dolphinsnot

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.implode.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.eregi_replace.php

<?php

function bang_gone($mindfood){

$thispage = implode("", file("http://www.yoursite.net/directory/$mindfood"));

$bang_gone = eregi_replace("#!/usr/local/bin/php","",$thispage);

echo $bang_gone;

}

i haven't tested it, but this function should do the trick....it pulls whatever your file is ($mindfood above) into a string and replaces all occurrences of #!/usr/local/bin/php with emptiness.

you should be able to incorporate it into your master index.php page and just call

<? bang_gone("$page.php"); ?>

instead of

<? include("$page.php"); ?>

i don't know if you'd be interested in using it, but below is a chunk of code i use as a sort of 'URL Cloaking Device'. i use it in my main php script that is similar to yours only database-backed. it allows you to use a URL structure like "www.mysite.org/web/links/fancy.html" instead of "www.mysite.org/web.php?table=links&page=fancy"

################

<?php

//URL Cloaking Device

/
$vars de-cloaks the necessary page assembly variables hidden in the URL.
It basically says $vars=whatever is in the URL after 'web', from the 2nd to 6th from last character.This removes the '/' and '.html' from whatever is after 'web'
www.mysite.org/web/links/fancy.html is stripped down to 'links/fancy'
/

$vars = substr($PATH_INFO, 1, -5);

/ This splits the de-cloaked variables into 2 parts of an array /

$slash = "/";
$var_array = split($slash, $vars);

/ This assigns $table and $page the proper values /
$table = $var_array[0];
$page= $var_array[1];

###########

anyhow....this should all get you pointed in the right direction.....lemme know if ya have any questions.

-dolphinsnot

Anon

I thought of doing something like this but the problem with this solution is that the included files with the content on them have PHP code in them as well. If after running the bang_gone function you just echo the result back to the browser, the PHP code in the content file will not be parsed.

The only other thing I could think of is to "eval" the $bang_gone string rather than echo it. Would this degrade performance of the whole site (having to run this function and then eval the results for every single page)?

dolphinsnot

yup. you're on the right track with the eval statement.

PHP is super-duper fast. you needn't worry about taking a few extra nanoseconds to eval $bang_gone.

i have my site set up using templates & a database. I've got one script (web.php) that assembles every page on the site by plugging template holes with info stored in the database. my template engine is set up such that after it assembles the page, it eval()'s it. this is nice 'cause it means i can store php-code in my db, and i don't have to worry about putting the #!/usr/local/bin at the top of pages stored in the db....no matter how complex the code, though, it always takes longer for the 25k or so of graphics to load than the php content...

check out this article on templates ----

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/david20000512.php3

depending on how you have your site structured, it may be easier for you to set it all up using the template engine in PHPLIB....

let me know whatcha think, and if it works.

:o)

-dolphinsnot

Anon

DolphinSnot-
Thanks for your help on this problem. I ended running your function from my template file to get rid of the bang statement. My problem was then that I had to eval the whole content page. I really didnt want to have to have each page be one big echo statement that had to been evaled and have to constantly drop in and out of echo mode and have to escape all my ' and ". I figured out that you can eval regular HTML if you preceed your HTML with "?>"