Displaying multiple strings from Python Script output with PHP

Question

I am currently trying to create a .php file that displays the output of a python file. Here is what I have so far (that semi works).

test.php

<?php
 echo "Results from wordgame.py...";
 echo "</br>";
 $output = exec('python wordgame.py cat dog');
 echo $output;
;?>

Here is what test.php returns...

Results from test.py...
dog

Here is the output from 'wordgame.py cat dog' I get when running it from the command line:

Generated: 2454
Expanded: 83
Revisited: 0
Path:
 dog
 cog
 cag
 cat

My question is, how do I get test.php to print out the same thing it prints at the command line? wordgame.py doesn't "return" anything, it just prints the lines once it's found a path between the words. Any and all help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Instead of exec, have a look at passthru. This function has no return value, but will echo the entire output of your python script directly to the browser.

echo "Results from wordgame.py...<br/>";
passthru('python wordgame.py cat dog');

---

Because you have <br/> in your original post, you may need to escape the python output and wrap it in a <pre/> tag to get the output formatted well for the browser. The easiest way to do this would be with php output buffering.

echo "Results from wordgame.py...<br/>";
ob_start();
passthru('python wordgame.py cat dog');
echo "<pre>" . htmlspecialchars(ob_get_clean()) . "</pre>";

This will work as long as wordgame has relatively short output. If not, you'll need to use a more elaborate solution involving proc_open on the PHP side, or make sure your python code is outputting escaped HTML.

• Micah: Thank you for this resource. I have replaced exec with passthru and it works! I will accept this as the answer shortly.