Calling PHP from Ruby and reading STDOUT

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

PHP and Ruby syntax are far enough apart that I was loathe to attempt a port of some working PHP scripts in my arsenal, but I needed to call said scripts from a relatively complex Ruby program. Fast & dirty integration of this type is generally performed using a system call, but unlike most things Ruby I didn't find the Ruby way in this case to be all that intuitive.
The %x technique for the system call made it easy to read the output of my PHP program into a variable in the calling script. The real trick was finding the correct syntax for passing a parameter to the %x call as shown below.
Learn from my studies grasshopper:

avariableparameter = "--o ipso -v lorem"result = %x[php /path/to/script.php "#{avariableparameter}"]

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Calling PHP from Ruby and reading STDOUT