Calling Python from PHP using shell_exec() in XAMPP

Question

I'm trying to make this work on XAMPP. It works fine on a Linux server/virtual machine. I need to send an associative array to a python script, and I do it with:

<?php
 echo "Test simple call/answer process<br>";
 $age = array("Peter"=>"35", "Ben"=>"37", "Joe"=>"43");
 $param = base64_encode(json_encode($age));
 $command = escapeshellcmd('python python_array_answer.py $param');
 $output = shell_exec($command);
 $obj = json_decode($output);
 print_r($obj);
?>

The Python script is:

#! /Users/.../AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python37/python.exe
import sys
import json
import base64
hotel_data = json.loads(base64.b64decode(sys.argv[1]))
print(json.dumps(hotel_data))

I get a NULL array back, with this error:

 Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "python_array_answer.py", line 6, in <module>
 hotel_data = json.loads(base64.b64decode(sys.argv[1]))
 File "C:\Users\mghiglia\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37\lib\base64.py", line 87, in b64decode
 return binascii.a2b_base64(s)
binascii.Error: Invalid base64-encoded string: number of data characters (5) cannot be 1 more than a multiple of 4
Any ideas? thank.

Answer 1

Assuming the rest of the code is okay, you're using single quotes in this line

$command = escapeshellcmd('python python_array_answer.py $param');

where you should either use double quotes, so php known to replace $param with the value of variable $param, or concatenate the two like this...

$command = escapeshellcmd('python python_array_answer.py '.$param);