Read server-side JavaScript from PHP

PHP can interact with JavasScript via the V8js library

I suppose that most answer in the client/server case involves JSON. What is stopping you from using the same method, albeit with the js script running on the server?

You could store these variables in a file in JSON, and have both the JS script and the PHP script load them. Of course, your PHP installation must support JSON to begin with.

Depends on the format. If your file is anywhere near to JSON and publicly accessible (or at least on the same server with PHP), you could do something like:

File test.js:

var data = {
    'Hello': 'L-ghodwa it-tajba',
    'Bye':   'Caw',
}

File reader.php:

<?php

    $data = file_get_contents('test.js'); // or http://url.to/test.js
    $data = str_replace('var data = ', '', $data);
    $data = json_decode($data);
    print_r($data);

?>

This system is also pretty efficient; it is about manipulating a string a little bit and parsing it as JSON instead of having a full-blown JS parser. However, you have to enforce the format of the js file.

Edit: Yea, well, seems Spudley got first a few seconds before mine. Basically, I'm doing what he suggested.

Edit 2: I've been thinking, you can simply make use of JSON files. These must contain JSON, so the format is already there; and you can use the same file through JS and PHP without problems or afterthoughts. JSON files end with a .json extension, by the way. You might need to tell your webserver what mimetype json is, using (Apache/htaccess):

AddType application/json .json

You should be using either pretty complex regular expressions if you are trying to parse a JS file in PHP, or you should be creating an API which will allow communicating between JS scripts (e.g. in Node) and PHP.

Question is, why do you need to do this in exact this fashion? Why can't you share data in a format that can be used by both JS and PHP? JSON, for example.