Recently I was building a simple PHP script that took the input of a CSV and extracted the data from it and feed it into a JSON-RPC based API.
Originally I had planned to automate the FTP of the CSV to the server, but then I thought if I could take the PHP file to the CSV it might be easier. The other issue I had was that I didn’t want to setup a complete server just to run a single PHP file.
Enter PHC-WIN: http://wiki.swiftlytilting.com/Phc-win
phc-win appears to be one of the simplest options for converting a simple script into a simple exe file (although a handful of DLL files are required to make the exe file run).
After testing and experimenting with the compiler, I thought “wouldn’t it be great to be able to pass some additional command line arguments to the complied file (think the filename of the CSV file).”
Well it turns out that you can. The variable that sorts the additional arguments is the “$_SERVER[‘argv’] array.
A simple print_r($_SERVER[‘argv’]); command allows you to see all the arguments and the order that they are passed to the program. It appears that the first one (position 0) is always the name of the application.
Quick, simple and easy :).
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