Output of fgets does not match formatting of file

Question

I try to save the output of the linux command ifconfig into a variable and show it in my html. I have two pages, one test.html and one ajax.php. If i click on a link on test.html then then an ajax request is made to ajax.phpwhich executes ifconfig and sends the result back to test.html where the whole html of the body tag is replaced with the output.

I have this code in my ajax.php. As you can see, i write the output of ifconfig into a file, so i can read each line from the filestream and output them.

shell_exec ("/sbin/ifconfig > /tmp/ifconfig 2>&1");
$ifconfig = fopen("/tmp/ifconfig","r") or die ("Unable to open file '/tmp/ifconfig'"); 

while(!feof($ifconfig))
{     
    echo fgets($ifconfig). "<br>";     
}

fclose($ifconfig);

But instead of an output like this:

 eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 0A:58:C2:71:7A:90  
           inet addr:172.15.47.121  Bcast:172.25.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
           RX packets:238319 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:122439 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
           RX bytes:21355179 (20.3 MiB)  TX bytes:19679738 (18.7 MiB)

I get this output:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 0A:58:C2:71:7A:905
inet addr:172.15.47.121 Bcast:172.15.255.223 Mask:255.255.0.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:23405 errors:0 dropped:14 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:16390 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1613474 (1.5 MiB) TX bytes:19949404 (19.0 MiB)

Can someone tell me how i can get the output in the same formatting as it actually is? Note: the addresses are not real, i changed them.

Answer 1

If your output should be for the website, just wrap it into <pre></pre> tags:

echo "<pre>";
while(!feof($ifconfig))
{
    echo fgets($ifconfig). "<br>";
}
echo "</pre>";

In pre tags the most browsers use monospace as font, so it looks a bit more like direct console output.