Calling PHP From C

Question

I am trying to write an application that will use PHP as a scripting language. The application is a CGI handler, and I want to be able to call PHP pages from it.

I am looking for code that will let me initialize PHP inside the C program and then pass it either a buffer containing the php code, or a filename, for it to parse. I want to take the output from that and be able to run it through a function in the CGI program.

Answer 1

Maybe this will work for what you need?:

FILE *f = fopen ("script.php", "wt");
fprintf (f, "<?php\n"
   "// script here\n"
   "?>\n");
fclose (f);
system ("php -f script.php >script.out");

f = fopen ("script.out", "r");
char buf [1000];
fgets (f, buf, sizeof buf);
// etc.

Edit: Well since you can't use system(), there appears to be no recommended way to link the PHP interpreter into a C program. The recommended solutions are similar to using system with forks and pipes. Either that, or place the PHP script on a webserver and connect to it from the C program.

Answer 2

Try the PHPEmbed library. It's for C++, rather than C, but it might still work for you, depending on the project requirements.

Answer 3

The book Extending and Embedding PHP by Sara Golemon (amazon) has a chapter about embedding PHP in a C programm, which might interest you.

If you want a preview, from what I remember, some pages are avaible on Google books, for instance.

Here's a quick quote (from the beginning of chapter 20.) :

In addition to loading external scripts, as you saw in the last chapter, your PHP embedding application can also execute smaller snippets of arbitrary code using the underlying function that implements the familiar userspace eval() command.

Answer 4

I would check out how they've implemented the php command line binary. It seems the main function is in php_cli.c

And it calls php_execute_scrip and a bunch of other functions which looks promising.