Calling External Software from PHP

chrislive

Hi everyone,

I have been asked to build a front-end for a C program our company developed Many Many years ago.

I am actually not a developer but have been teaching myself PHP (with the help you guys sometimes hehe)

Basically what I want to know is; what is the best way to call external applications in PHP.

Basically the software is a Indexing Database that stores metadata etc they have executables/scripts that are used for different functions.

eg: dbsearch -DB01 keyword
will load the console that we can then enter keywords.

So what is the best way to run this command and then get the results and then have the ability to manipulate these results into nice formatted pages.

I know some about arrays etc which I assume I will require.

Any ideas 🙂

Thanks
Chris

Kudose

Check into [man]system[/man].

Weedpacket

The best method would be to write an extension using the [man]Zend[/man] API.

The simplest would be to use one of the system functions, as Kudose suggests.

chrislive

I believe that for me to write a Zend module is a bit beyond me at the moment so I will go with the system() functions.

I have gotten then going but the format is a not very clean. eg i do this:


$list_directory = system('ls -l', $retval);

and the output is like so:

total 8 -rwxr-xr-x 1 99 4294967295 218 Jun 2 13:45 index2.php -rwxrwxrwx 1 0 504 227 Jun 2 13:55 index.php

with no breaks or anything.. is their a way to input each line into an array which I can then manipulate and format as I like???

Thanks
Chris

Weedpacket

They are on separate lines, separated by linebreak characters; HTML treats linebreak characters as spaces. But see the other system functions, especially [man]exec[/man].

Kudose

Weedpacket,

Just out of curiousity, is the returned formatted with \n or \r\n?

chrislive

can i do a string split based on this line break?? i tried using nl2br but no luck hehe

chrislive

hmmm im still not able to split the string as I need it.. any ideas?

Weedpacket

Is why I suggested you look at [man]exec[/man].

chrislive

i did look at it but I need to get the individual lines into an array so I can format, sort and provide a means late of running functions based on the result. (i wont be using ls -l in the real scripts, its just an example. but the idea is the same when i run my dbsearch command it will return a set off results similar to ls -l

can you help with the splitting of the result??

Weedpacket

[man]system[/man]

// Outputs all the result of shellcommand "ls", and returns
// the last output line into $last_line. Stores the return value
// of the shell command in $retval.
$last_line = system('ls', $retval);

So all that stuff on your screen was output and not stored anywhere (Kudose: it depends on your system.)

exec
output
If the output argument is present, then the specified array will be filled with every line of output from the command. Line endings, such as \n, are not included in this array.

(Okay, so the original [man]exec[/man] didn't go directly there, but I did suggest you look at some of the other functions.)