Question

Ok, here’s my scenario.

I have file.php that contains the following:

<?php
$output = shell_exec("php output.php");
echo $output;   
?>

And the output.php contains the following:

<?php
echo "This is my output!";
?>

When I run file.php from a web browser, I get the following output:

‹ ÉÈ,V¢ÜJ…üÒ’‚ÒEÿÿp³*š

However, when I run the same php output.php directly from the shell, I get the correct output:

This is my output!

Now I’m well aware that this is some sort of encoding issue, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to resolved it. I’ve tried setting the language using putenv('LANG=en_US.UTF-8');. I also tried using header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8'); and even trying to determine what encoding type is being outputted using mb_detect_encoding($out, 'UTF-8', true);. without result.

exec() produces the same, malformed output.

I would really appreciate if anyone can shed some light on this and can possibly provide some insight on what is happening between the shell_exec and the output of the file to cause the output to be malformed.

Answer 1

The problem was the PHP output was being compressed twice, due to output compression being enabled.

The solution is to disable zlib.output_compression either by an entry in your .htaccess file, or by including the following at the top of your .php file:

ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'Off');