PHP code stored in database, how to parse on echo?

homncruse

The title says it all, but in a few more words, is there a way I can store PHP code in mySQL and echo it back from a query, and actually have the PHP parse?

Basically, what I am attempting to do is an index page that pulls the content of the page specified from the mySQL database. It works fine with static HTML pages, but any page that has PHP code inside it simply displays the raw PHP code rather than actually parsing it. It's probably something simple that I'm just overlooking. I'm using an echo statement right now, but maybe there's another similar command I need to use?

:edit: See 3 posts down for my working code snippet.

tsinka

Hi,

have a look at the eval function.

Thomas

tsinka

I forgot to mention that eval expects the argument to be valid php code. So if you have a mixture of html and php code and that code begins with html then you need to add ?> at the beginning of the string in order to close the php block that eval expects to be in.

Example:

<?PHP
$strEval = "?><html>.....<?PHP \$a = 5; echo \$a; ?>....</html>";
eval($strEval);
?>

Thomas

homncruse

Awesome. That's EXACTLY what I was looking for. I knew it was something simple 🙂

For future reference though, in case anyone uses the Search button and finds this thread, here's the relevant portion of my code:

<?

$articletext = $postrow["post_text"];
if(substr($articletext, 0, 8) !== "&lt;?php") {
	$articletext = "?> " . $articletext;
}

eval(html_entity_decode($articletext));

?>

We're using phpBB to post content to our other pages, and phpBB encodes the HTML characters during posting, hence the "<?php" rather than "<?php". That one also took me a little while to figure out, since it should've worked in theory 😛