what does this do?

ajcether

Can someone please explain to me what this code does:

$cmd = "LANG=en_US lynx -dump " . $this->path;
$lines = `${cmd}`;

sorry for the noobness... at the moment, when I try to echo $lines, theres nothing there, and I think that the text from the file at $this->path is supposed to be in there?

It's the lynx -dump and the '${cmd}' that're confusing me I think

Thanks

illzz

Lynx is a command-line web browser (in case you didn't know).

From the lynx man page:

-dump   dumps the formatted output of the default document or one specified on the command line
        to standard output.  This can be used in the following way:

    lynx -dump http://www.subir.com/lynx.html

So basically, it's trying to display the web page at $this->path.

What server OS are you running this on? Does it have lynx installed?

illzz

A better option would to not rely on the third-party app (also in case you want to run this on Windows). You can try using file_get_contents():

<?
$html_contents = file_get_contents($this->path);
$lines         = $html_contents;
?>

ajcether

Do you know of anyway i can get rid of all the HTML parts of the code? I want to be able to take the actual text (article) out of the html page's content and post it into a newsgroup. So I need all the display and html code excluded when I post the message to the newsgroup.

bretticus

ajcether wrote:
Do you know of anyway i can get rid of all the HTML parts of the code? I want to be able to take the actual text (article) out of the html page's content and post it into a newsgroup. So I need all the display and html code excluded when I post the message to the newsgroup.

Sure, strip_tags. You may need to isolate the copy of the article (for instance say the whole copy of article is in a div layer) before removing all the html tags though.

ajcether

awesome I'll give that a try

ajcether

so if I use strip_tags, I lose the <p> tags that format the article, is there a way for me to find </p> tags and add a \n to it or something before stripping the tags? Thanks for your help.

illzz

If you want to keep them, try using the second parameter of the function...

ajcether

where would I look to see if lynx is installed? Before this stopped working, the articles would be posted to the newsgroups with a certain formatting, and I think maybe lynx was doing it?? anyways I can't get it to work with any new thing I try.

illzz

do you have shell access to the server?

ajcether

yes

illzz

type in something like

[user@localhost ~]$ lynx -dump www.google.com

[user@localhost ~]$ which lynx

what do you get?

ajcether

I get "/usr/bin/which: no lynx in (/usr/......) for "which lynx"

and "-bash: lynx: command not found" for the -dump

that mean its not there, or am i just not looking in the right spot?

Kudose

It means that either lynx isn't installed or it is not in the server's [include] PATH

You can check for lynx with:

find / -name lynx

If lynx isn't found:
If you use Fedora, you can use yum install lynx
Other OSes have package installers too (i.e. apt-get, up2date, etc)

If lynx is found:
Add it to your server's include PATH

ajcether

I use OS X, I downloaded lynx but I can't find how to install it without needing to download something else...is there a way for me to do that?

Kudose

Sorry, I am Mac retarded.

What dependency does it want you to download?

ajcether

So, according to a server admin, lynx is fine on our server.... any reasons why $lines would have nothing but 1 blank line in it after this:

$cmd = "LANG=en_US lynx -dump " . $this->path;
$lines = `${cmd}`;

After here if I loop through and try to echo each line in $lines, I just get 1 blank line and that's it. Any ideas?

illzz

try using shell_exec()...

$cmd = "lynx -dump " . $this->path;
$lines = shell_exec($cmd);

I took a look at Execution Operators, and came across this note...

Note: The backtick operator is disabled when safe mode is enabled or shell_exec() is disabled.

I guess if this doesn't work, you may want to make sure that shell_exec is enabled.

ajcether

I still get nothing but 1 blank line...how do I check that shell_exec is enabled?

illzz

Are you sure that $this->path is a valid URL? Try printing the command syntax out and make sure that it is valid.

$cmd = "lynx -dump " . $this->path;
echo $cmd;

Also, try this and see if you get some valid output.

<?php
echo '<pre>';
echo shell_exec('whoami');
echo $bin = shell_exec('which lynx');
echo shell_exec('ls -l ' . $bin);
echo shell_exec('lynx -dump www.google.com'); 
echo '</pre>';
?>