executing Python script in PHP and exchanging data between the two

Question

Is it possible to run a Python script within PHP and transferring variables from each other ?

I have a class that scraps websites for data in a certain global way. i want to make it go a lot more specific and already have pythons scripts specific to several website.

I am looking for a way to incorporate those inside my class.

Is safe and reliable data transfer between the two even possible ? if so how difficult it is to get something like that going ?

Answer 1

You can generally communicate between languages by using common language formats, and using stdin and stdout to communicate the data.

Example with PHP/Python using a shell argument to send the initial data via JSON

PHP:

// This is the data you want to pass to Python
$data = array('as', 'df', 'gh');

// Execute the python script with the JSON data
$result = shell_exec('python /path/to/myScript.py ' . escapeshellarg(json_encode($data)));

// Decode the result
$resultData = json_decode($result, true);

// This will contain: array('status' => 'Yes!')
var_dump($resultData);

Python:

import sys, json

# Load the data that PHP sent us
try:
    data = json.loads(sys.argv[1])
except:
    print "ERROR"
    sys.exit(1)

# Generate some data to send to PHP
result = {'status': 'Yes!'}

# Send it to stdout (to PHP)
print json.dumps(result)