Question

I am trying to write an application that will use PHP as a scripting language. The application is a CGI handler, and I want to be able to call PHP pages from it.

I am looking for code that will let me initialize PHP inside the C program and then pass it either a buffer containing the php code, or a filename, for it to parse. I want to take the output from that and be able to run it through a function in the CGI program.

Answer 1

The book Extending and Embedding PHP by Sara Golemon (amazon) has a chapter about embedding PHP in a C programm, which might interest you.

If you want a preview, from what I remember, some pages are avaible on Google books, for instance.

Here’s a quick quote (from the beginning of chapter 20.) :

In addition to loading external
scripts, as you saw in the last
chapter, your PHP embedding
application can also execute smaller
snippets of arbitrary code using the
underlying function that implements
the familiar userspace eval()
command.