Is it possible to pass an array as a command line argument to a PHP script?

Question

I\'m maintaining a PHP library that is responsible for fetching and storing incoming data (POST, GET, command line arguments, etc). I\'ve just fixed a bug that would not all

Answer 1

After following the set of instructions below you can make a call like this:

phpcl yourscript.php _GET='{ "key1": "val1", "key2": "val2" }'

To get this working you need code to execute before the script being called. I use a bash shell on linux and in my .bashrc file I set the command line interface to make the php ini flag auto_prepend_file load my command line bootstrap file (this file should be found somewhere in your php_include_path):

alias phpcl='php -d auto_prepend_file="system/bootstrap/command_line.php"'

This means that each call from the command line will execute this file before running the script that you call. auto_prepend_file is a great way to bootstrap your system, I use it in my standard php.ini to set my final exception and error handlers at a system level. Setting this command line auto_prepend_file overrides my normal setting and I choose to just handle command line arguments so that I can set $_GET or $_POST. Here is the file I prepend:

 1)
{
   $parsedArgs = array(); 

   for ($i = 1; $i < $argc; $i++)
   {
      parse_str($argv[$i], $parsedArgs[$i]);
   }

   foreach ($parsedArgs as $arg)
   {
      foreach ($arg as $key => $val)
      {
         // Set the global variable of name $key to the json decoded value.
         $$key = json_decode($val, true);
      }
   }

   unset($parsedArgs);
}
?>

It loops through all arguments passed and sets global variables using variable variables (note the $$). The manual page does say that variable variables doesn't work with superglobals, but it seems to work for me with $_GET (I'm guessing it works with POST too). I choose to pass the values in as JSON. The return value of json_decode will be NULL on error, you should do error checking on the decode if you need it.