python output not coming properly while being called from php

Question

I have the following python code:

open_file=open("path to a file",'r')
from prettytable import PrettyTable
import csv
table1=PrettyTable(["COLUMN1","COLUMN2","COLUMN3"])
for lines in open_file:
 temp=(lines.split("%")[1])
 get_severity_no=temp.split(":")[0]
 Description=temp.split(":")[1]
 if "3" in get_severity_no:
 GET_DATE=lines.split(";")[0]
 table1.add_row([GET_DATE,get_severity_no,Description])
print(table1)

This code will simply print the desired output in a table format. Sample output shown below:enter image description here

Now I'm calling this script from php. Here is the php code.

<?php
$mystring = system('python get_files.py');
echo $mystring
?>

Now this is the output that I'm getting.

enter image description here

All the formatting has been lost. Could u please let me know what I should do to make this proper? I'm very new to php but comfortable with python.

Answer 1

Use <pre> tags around your output, as so:

<pre>
 <?php
 $mystring = system('python get_files.py');
 echo $mystring;
 ?>
</pre>

pre stands for "preformatted text", and pre tags render "plain text" exactly how it was entered, which is widely used for displaying code, command output, and other ASCII formatted tables & shapes (like yours) on webpages. Pre tags treat new-line's as <br>'s, conserves repetitive spaces (like you have in your table), treats < and> literally and not as HTML tags, and uses a fixed-width font.

You won't want to use pre tags all the time, because HTML tags inside of it, such as <img>, won't even be rendered. It displays any text literally as it was entered.

Hope this helps,

• soma: It helped. Thanks !!
• soma: What's a pre tag??
• Aaron Gillion: @soma It renders plain text in readable form, treating new-line's as <br>'s, conserves repetitive spaces (like you have in your table), treats < and > literally and not as HTML tags, and uses a fixed-width font.

Answer 2

There's a difference in how the console and the browsers actually format outputs.

The console represents new line with \n while browsers need proper HTML tags <br>. Same thing for spaces. The console will print as many spaces as there are but browsers/HTML removes consecutive spaces (so that only one remains).

So if you want to have exactly the same output, you'll need to convert your line breaks from \n to <br> - you can use the nl2br function for that. Regarding spaces, you'll probably want to convert all spaces to non-breakable spaces, to tell the browsers to render consecutive spaces. You can do that with a regex: preg_replace('/ /', ' ', $str);