Question

If I have a file a.php which I can’t edit.

<?php
$a = 1;
function a() {
  global $a;
  echo $a;
}  
a();

then running php a.php prints 1 nicely. But if I have b.php:

<?php
function b() {
  include "a.php";
}
b();

Then running php b.php doesn’t print anything.

What can I type before the include "a.php" to make it behave the same without editing a.php?

(Obviously other than defining $a. In my real-world example it has to work for a complicated a.php).

Answer 1

It sounds like a.php is some legacy or 3rd party script that you have to wrap in your own application. I had a similar problem once and the solution was not pretty. First, you will have to find out, what global variables exist (grep global or similar helps).

This is the relevant part of my “Script Adapter” class:

private function _includeScript($file, $globals)
{
    foreach ($globals as $global) {
        global $$global;
    }

    ob_start();
    require $file;
    $this->_response->setBody(ob_get_clean());
}

As you see, I had to catch the output too. The class also emulates $_GET and catches header calls to assign everything to a Response object, but for your case only this method is important. It gets called with the file name and an array of global variable names as parameters:

_includeScript('a.php', array('a'));