PHP Put list from Powershell into Array - php

Question

Code:
$exchangesnapin = "Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010";
$output = shell_exec('powershell '.$exchangesnapin.';"get-mailboxdatabase" 2>&1');
echo( '<pre>' );
echo( $output );
echo( '</pre>' );
Result:
Name Server Recovery ReplicationType
---- ------ -------- ---------------
Mailbox Database 0651932265 EGCVMADTEST False None
Mailbox Database 0651932266 EGCVMADTEST False None
I tried with
echo( $output[1] );
The result was only a letter 'N'. I believe its taking the Name column but one character at a time.
$output[1] is 'N', $output[2] is 'a'.
Is there any way I can get the mailbox list into array?

Answer 1

you are trying to execute an external program (powershell) from PHP and have the output as an array.
In order to execute an external program in PHP, you could use:
exec() function
shell_exec() function
system() function
backtick operator
process control extensions
using process control extensions (PCNTL, popen) gives you more control, but takes more code and time. using the execution functions are simpler.
In this situation, using exec() could help you to have the output of powershell in an array whose each index is a line from the powershell output.
<?php
$output = array(); // this would hold the powershell output lines
$return_code = 0; // this would hold the return code from powershell, might be used to detect execution errors
$last_line = exec("powershell {$exchangesnapin} get-mailboxdatabase 2>&1", $output, $return_code);
echo "<pre>";
// print_r($output); view the whole array for debugging
// or iterate over array indexes
foreach($output as $line) {
echo $line . PHP_EOL;
}
echo "</pre>";
?>
Please note that (as the documentation says) if you only want to echo the output of powershell, you could use the passthru() function. using exec() uses memory to store the output of the external program, but using passthru would not use this storage, resulting in less memory usage. But the output could not be used for further processing, and is sent to the PHP standard output right a way.
In the end, please note that external program execution requires careful data validation to reduce the risk of unwanted system effects. Make sure you use escapeshellarg() on the data that constructs the execution command.