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GNU Octave from PHP without temp files

Of course... How haven't I thought that? Pipes!

I was "googling" about PHP and Octave and I had found some simple approach at a mailing list archive. I had already used Octave with PHP but I had always used temporary files, but pipes are a much simpler approach.

From the mailing list post:
in php
start "octave -q script" with popen

create a string in php e.g. "input_data = [102 10 10 10 10 10];"

write this string to the pipe

in octave

recive the string with fread on stdin
let the eval function do the job
calculate

print the result with printf in php syntax "$result = array(12,10,9,12,)"

php
read the output from the pipe (with php fread)
use phps eval function


but using eval with octave and php is a security risk, to avid eval parse
the matrix wird scanf

this is also not the fastes way to use octave (the octave startup needs a
lot of time)
Labels:

Comments

  1. Juanlu001January 17, 2010 at 4:51 AM

    Hello! I'm really interested about this idea, but I'm not sure how to implement it. Would you write a sample PHP file?

    Thank you very much!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Filipi ViannaJune 14, 2010 at 12:03 PM

    Juanlu_001,

    I didn't write any prototype calling the GNU Octave this way. As soon as I have one, I will post it here at my blog.

    What I already have about PHP+Octave is a old post on a pumps dimensioning system.

    ReplyDelete
  3. BogdanJanuary 6, 2012 at 4:11 AM

    Check out Octave daemon, if you ever need something like this again.

    ReplyDelete

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