CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phparrays
Tom Iv
Tom Iv

Reputation: 449

How to store output of exec() command in an array using PHP

I have a Linux web server running a PHP/HTML page.

I need to save an output that has to interpreted as an array -

    exec($instruction);

where the output will be

    1 2 5 7 0 5 3 4

and I must be able to call out particular element in the array

    echo $result[4]

so far the following attempts were unsuccessful

    $result =exec($instruction); 
    or
    $result = array(exec($instruction));

Update, So far I tried this -

$result = shell_exec($instruction);
$out = explode(" ",$result);

I got the expected output, but why doesn't exxplode() return individual elements?

Array ( [0] => 1 1 1 2 1 2 0 0 1 1 )

Upvotes: 3

Views: 21358

Answers (4)

Lorenzo Lerate
Lorenzo Lerate

Reputation: 3870

I prefer to use:

$result = shell_exec($instruction);
$out = explode("\n",$result);

Because shell_exec function returns the complete output as string. If you have more than one line, you should use that.

Upvotes: 0

Diana R.
Diana R.

Reputation: 315

According to documentation (php.net) exec has a second parameter that is passed by reference called $output. So you can try:

exec($instruction, $results);

And then you can access $results that will be an array with each line as an element. So:

$results[0]

will have the first line of your output.

Upvotes: 14

Tom Iv
Tom Iv

Reputation: 449

Why explode did not work for me? The shell $instruction that I used returned "newline" or "\n". I had to split the string using "\n" as the delimiter. This worked for me -

$result = shell_exec($instruction);
$out = explode("\n",$result);

Upvotes: 4

user557846
user557846

Reputation: 

$result =exec($instruction); 
$result_array=explode(' ',$result);

or just

$result =explode(' ',exec($instruction));

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions