Question

I’m trying to test a php file from a C program(…)

Basically I have a filename that I want to check against php -l and store the output for further processing.

Answer 1

A simple solution in that case would be to redirect the output to a file. And then read the file into an array. You then can have your further processing with the array.

Something like this(in C):

system("php -l yourfile.php > myfile");
FILE *f = fopen("myfile", "rb");
fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END);
long pos = ftell(f);
fseek(f, 0, SEEK_SET);
char *array = malloc(pos);
fread(array, pos, 1, f);
fclose(f);

//your processing part here..

free(array); // free allocated memory

Solution #2: Invoke the PHP interpreter, and pipe the output to your program.
Something like the following in the console:

php -l yourfile.php | pathToYourCProgram

In the above case, you will read the output of PHP from stdin. You can read the entire input, and directly store it to an array.