create php array from shell/bash output

Question

I'm writing a php script that will execute a bash script on the server. The one thing that is absolutely required for this exercise is that we're using /var/tmp/count.sh to get my data.

bash script:

#!/bin/bash
#filename: /var/tmp/count.sh
cat /etc/passwd | grep ':201:' | awk -F ':' '{print $1}'
#This command will spit out:
# user1
# user2
# user3

PHP Script:

<?php
$output = shell_exec('/var/tmp/count.sh');
$sizeofme = sizeof($output);
echo "$output" . "\n" ;
echo "sizeofme = $sizeofme" . "\n" ;
// this spits out:
// user1
// user2
// user3
// sizeofme = 1
?>

How do I make a PHP array that contains 3 elements?

A PHP equivielant of the following bash for loop:

for i in ${output[@]; do
    newarray+=("$i")
done

Also, I noticed that if I do:

<?php
echo $output[0] . "\n" ;
echo $output[1] . "\n" ;
echo $output[2] . "\n" ;
echo $output[3] . "\n" ;
echo $output[4] . "\n" ;
echo $output[5] . "\n" ;
echo $output[6] . "\n" ;
echo $output[7] . "\n" ;
echo $output[8] . "\n" ;
echo $output[9] . "\n" ;
?>

I get:

u
s
e
r
1

u
s
e
r
2

... so on and so forth. What am I overlooking?

The reason it's outputting like that is that you can treat a string as an array and get a single character back. — Machavity
– Machavity ♦, Commented Jul 19, 2016 at 21:49

Machavity · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-19 21:51:08Z

1

I think PHP is treating the return as one contiguous string. Try the following

$data = explode("\n", $output);
var_dump($data);

That should give you the array you want

answered Jul 19, 2016 at 21:51

Machavity♦

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3 Comments

Juan Tomas Over a year ago

Related SO question: how to iterate over a string line by line. explode is more concise, +1

parsecpython Over a year ago

This is good. it's working like I expect. One issue though: the last entry is a newline: [3]=> string(0) "" I'll work on trimming it out but thanks, this is good

parsecpython Over a year ago

$data = explode("\n", $output); $data2 = array_pop($data);

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