executing Python script in PHP and exchanging data between the two

Question

Is it possible to run a Python script within PHP and transferring variables from each other ?

I have a class that scraps websites for data in a certain global way. i want to make it go a lot more specific and already have pythons scripts specific to several website.

I am looking for a way to incorporate those inside my class.

Is safe and reliable data transfer between the two even possible ? if so how difficult it is to get something like that going ?

Answer 1

You can generally communicate between languages by using common language formats, and using stdin and stdout to communicate the data.

Example with PHP/Python using a shell argument to send the initial data via JSON

PHP:

// This is the data you want to pass to Python $data = array('as', 'df', 'gh');  // Execute the python script with the JSON data $result = shell_exec('python /path/to/myScript.py ' . escapeshellarg(json_encode($data)));  // Decode the result $resultData = json_decode($result, true);  // This will contain: array('status' => 'Yes!') var_dump($resultData); 

Python:

import sys, json  # Load the data that PHP sent us try:     data = json.loads(sys.argv[1]) except:     print "ERROR"     sys.exit(1)  # Generate some data to send to PHP result = {'status': 'Yes!'}  # Send it to stdout (to PHP) print json.dumps(result)