Question

what I want to do is have a PHP script run a program and have it retrieve data somehow from it. For instance the program would parse data from a file and return the data for the PHP script to display.

So far I know to call exec("Program.exe"); but would I have to make it create a file with the data then have the PHP script call fopen and get it that way? Is there a better way to do it? Thanks

Answer 1

As per the manual page for exec(), you can pass an array to it as another parameter, and that array will be filled with the lines of output from the program.

exec("Program.exe", $results);
// $results is now an array where each element is a line of output