Question

Code:

$exchangesnapin = "Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010";
$output = shell_exec('powershell '.$exchangesnapin.';"get-mailboxdatabase" 2>&1'); 
echo( '<pre>' );
echo( $output );
echo( '</pre>' );

Result:

Name                           Server          Recovery        ReplicationType 
----                           ------          --------        --------------- 
Mailbox Database 0651932265    EGCVMADTEST     False           None        
Mailbox Database 0651932266    EGCVMADTEST     False           None    

I tried with

echo( $output[1] );

The result was only a letter ‘N’. I believe its taking the Name column but one character at a time.

$output[1] is 'N', $output[2] is 'a'.

Is there any way I can get the mailbox list into array?

Answer 1

you are trying to execute an external program (powershell) from PHP and have the output as an array.
In order to execute an external program in PHP, you could use:

• exec() function
• shell_exec() function
• system() function
• backtick operator
• process control extensions

using process control extensions (PCNTL, popen) gives you more control, but takes more code and time. using the execution functions are simpler.

In this situation, using exec() could help you to have the output of powershell in an array whose each index is a line from the powershell output.

<?php
$output = array(); // this would hold the powershell output lines
$return_code = 0; // this would hold the return code from powershell, might be used to detect execution errors
$last_line = exec("powershell {$exchangesnapin} get-mailboxdatabase 2>&1", $output, $return_code);
echo "<pre>";
// print_r($output); view the whole array for debugging
// or iterate over array indexes
foreach($output as $line) {
    echo $line . PHP_EOL;
}
echo "</pre>";
?>

Please note that (as the documentation says) if you only want to echo the output of powershell, you could use the passthru() function. using exec() uses memory to store the output of the external program, but using passthru would not use this storage, resulting in less memory usage. But the output could not be used for further processing, and is sent to the PHP standard output right a way.

In the end, please note that external program execution requires careful data validation to reduce the risk of unwanted system effects. Make sure you use escapeshellarg() on the data that constructs the execution command.