How to pass variables as stdin into command line from PHP

Question

I am trying to write a PHP script that uses the pdftk app to merge an XFDF with a PDF form and output the merged PDF to the user. According to the pdftk documentation, I can

Answer 1

1) Why are you outputting to standard out and then putting that stuff into a file? Why not just have pdftk dump to the file, i.e.

exec("pdftk blankform.pdf fill_form formdata.xfdf output filledform.pdf");

2) Use proc_open(). Feel free to post any problems you have with the function.

Answer 2

I'm not sure about what you're trying to achieve. You can read stdin with the URL php://stdin. But that's the stdin from the PHP command line, not the one from pdftk (through exec).

But I'll give a +1 for proc_open()

---

<?php

$cmd = sprintf('pdftk %s fill_form %s output -','blank_form.pdf', raw2xfdf($_POST));

$descriptorspec = array(
   0 => array("pipe", "r"),  // stdin is a pipe that the child will read from
   1 => array("pipe", "w"),  // stdout is a pipe that the child will write to
   2 => null,
);

$process = proc_open($cmd, $descriptorspec, $pipes);

if (is_resource($process)) {
    // $pipes now looks like this:
    // 0 => writeable handle connected to child stdin
    // 1 => readable handle connected to child stdout

    fwrite($pipes[0], stream_get_contents(STDIN)); // file_get_contents('php://stdin')
    fclose($pipes[0]);

    $pdf_content = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
    fclose($pipes[1]);

    // It is important that you close any pipes before calling
    // proc_close in order to avoid a deadlock
    $return_value = proc_close($process);


    header('Content-type: application/pdf');
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="output.pdf"');
    echo $pdf_content;
}
?>