Question

I have a php file list.php

<?php
$arr=array('444','555');
echo var_export($arr);
?>

Now I want to get the array from another php script using file_get_contents.
how can be this achieved ? I dont want to use sessions. The two scripts are on different servers.

Answer 1

You can either serialize() the array or use json_encode() to encode the array in JSON. Then, in the other PHP script, you would use unserialize() or json_decode() to get the string back into an array.

Example, using serialize():

In a.php (on server A)

$array = array( "foo" => 5, "bar" => "baz");
file_put_contents( 'array.txt', serialize( $array));

In b.php (on server B)

$string = file_get_contents( 'http://www.otherserver.com/array.txt');
$array = unserialize( $string);
var_dump( $array); // This will print the original array

---

You can also output the string from a PHP script, instead of saving it to a file, like so:

In a.php (on server A)

$array = array( "foo" => 5, "bar" => "baz");
echo serialize( $array); exit;

In b.php (on server B)

$string = file_get_contents( 'http://www.otherserver.com/a.php');
$array = unserialize( $string);
var_dump( $array); // This will print the original array