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)