Calling Python in PHP

Depending on what you are doing, system() or popen() may be perfect. Use system() if the Python script has no output, or if you want the Python script's output to go directly to the browser. Use popen() if you want to write data to the Python script's standard input, or read data from the Python script's standard output in php. popen() will only let you read or write, but not both. If you want both, check out proc_open(), but with two way communication between programs you need to be careful to avoid deadlocks, where each program is waiting for the other to do something.

If you want to pass user supplied data to the Python script, then the big thing to be careful about is command injection. If you aren't careful, your user could send you data like "; evilcommand ;" and make your program execute arbitrary commands against your will.

escapeshellarg() and escapeshellcmd() can help with this, but personally I like to remove everything that isn't a known good character, using something like

preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/', '', $str)

You can run a python script via php, and outputs on browser.

Basically you have to call the python script this way:

$command = "python /path/to/python_script.py 2>&1";
$pid = popen( $command,"r");
while( !feof( $pid ) )
{
 echo fread($pid, 256);
 flush();
 ob_flush();
 usleep(100000);
}
pclose($pid);

Note: if you run any time.sleep() in you python code, it will not outputs the results on browser.

For full codes working, visit How to execute python script from php and show output on browser


The shell_exec() operator will also allow you to run python scripts using similar syntax to above

In a python file called python.py:

hello = "hello"
world = "world"
print hello + " " + world

In a php file called python.php:

$python = shell_exec(python python.py);
echo $python;

I do this kind of thing all the time for quick-and-dirty scripts. It's quite common to have a CGI or PHP script that just uses system/popen to call some external program.

Just be extra careful if your web server is open to the internet at large. Be sure to sanitize your GET/POST input in this case so as to not allow attackers to run arbitrary commands on your machine.

Tags:

Python

Php