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phpshellcommandiconv

shell command with options from php

I have this code:

$codif ="file --mime-encoding -b inputfile.txt";
$codif = shell_exec($codif);
$encode = "iconv --from-code=$codif --to-code=UTF-8 --output=tempfile.txt inputfile.txt";

I have tried

shell_exec($encode); //1
exec($encode); //2
system($encode); //3

And I have this just to see what's the generated command:

echo $encode;

Which outputs this:

iconv --from-code=iso-8859-1 --to-code=UTF-8 --output=tempfile.txt inputfile.txt

The problem is that with either of the three forms of executing the command I get next error:

sh: 2: --to-code=UTF-8: not found

While executing the output command at the shell works perfectly. I have also tried changing the --to-code=UTF-8 to -t UTF-8 with the same results. So the questions are, what am I doing wrong and how to fix it? thanks!

Solution

  • You have a new line at the end of the $codif variable, which messes things up. That needs to be stripped out some way. You can try this for example:

    $codif ="file --mime-encoding -b inputfile.txt|tr -d '\n'";
$codif = shell_exec($codif);

    Piping output of file command to tr -d "\n" will remove the new line. You can of course remove that in the php code aswell.