Question

I’ve got a bit of a mess here.

Windows Server 2008 R1 + IIS6 + PHP5.3.10

I have a PHP script which connects to a small, local mssql database, performs a search and puts the results into variables. There are 6 columns in the db though only 4 of them are worth passing.

I have a console python program (in 2.7 flavor) on this server. It takes 4 arguments (target email address, subject, body and key (key is a 64 alphanum string). This python program then puts all of this into an HTML template (which is defined in the program itself) and emails it off to the target.

OK – both of these individually work! Now the fun part. Am I able to have PHP launch this python program, which sits in the same directory as the php script and pass off four arguments/parameters to it? The arguments/parameters may have spaces in them.

Answer 1

You will probably want to use exec() or shell_exec() to run your python script. Also use escapeshellarg() and escapeshellcmd() as appropriate to sanitize your input. This may look like this:

$escaped_cmd = escapeshellcmd('nameofexecutable.exe para1 para2 para3');
exec($escaped_cmd);

Of course you need proper permissions to run the executable.