Use HTML output of PHP in shell script - php

Question

I have a PHP script that creates large complex tables. I am attempting to set up a shell script which would accept an ID as an argument and then run the PHP script using the ID and accept the HTML output of the PHP script for use as part of a cURL post to DocRaptor to make a PDF.
Example shell script looks like this and I want the document_content to be my generated HTML.
myHTML = usr/bin/php mytablemaker.php?id=$1
curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d'{"user_credentials":"API_KEY", "doc":{"name":"docraptor_sample.pdf", "document_type":"pdf", "test":"true", "document_content":"myHTML"}}' http://docraptor.com/docs > docraptor_sample.pdf
How do I do this correctly?

Answer 1

If that is bash, something like this should work:
myHTML = $(usr/bin/php mytablemaker.php?id=$1)
curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d'{"user_credentials":"API_KEY", "doc":{"name":"docraptor_sample.pdf", "document_type":"pdf", "test":"true", "document_content":"'"$myHTML"'"}}' http://docraptor.com/docs > docraptor_sample.pdf
However you don't ask for HTML but for HTML as a json string, so make you PHP script encode the string as json, see json_encode. Or do a addcslashes($output, '"') on the " characters.
See as well:
Bash Scripting: Redirect output into variable

Answer 2

The best way is to modify that mytablemaker.php to take the command line use case into account.
e.g. like this:
if(isset($argv[1])) {
$id=$argv[1];
} else {
$id=$_GET["id"];
}
Then from BASH you do:
# Get HTML from PHP script and escape quotes and
# backslashes in string to comply to the JSON specification
myHTML=$(/usr/bin/php -f mytablemaker.php $1 | sed -e 's/[\\"]/\\&/g')
# Put the value of myHTML in a JSON call and send it to the server
curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d'{"user_credentials":"API_KEY", "doc":{"name":"docraptor_sample.pdf", "document_type":"pdf", "test":"true", "document_content":"'"$myHTML"'"}}' http://docraptor.com/docs -o docraptor_sample.pdf
Note the string concatenation done at the last line:
'first part'"second part"'third part'

Answer 3

The examples supplied did not mention a document_url parameter but DocRaptor's error message did.
Working code using what I learned from hakre and anttix!
curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d'{"user_credentials":"API_KEY", "doc":{"name":"docraptor_sample.pdf", "document_type":"pdf", "test":"false", "document_url":"'"http://foo.com/tablemaker.php?CTN=$1"'"}}' http://docraptor.com/docs -o docraptor_sample.pdf