Req #43908 [Com]: Add an optional parameter to exec() to not trim whitespace from output

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=43908&edit=1 ID: 43908 Comment by: dwake at box dot com Reported by: Arne dot Heizmann at csr dot com Summary: Add an optional parameter to exec() to not trim whitespace from output Status: Wont fix Type: Feature/Change Request Package: *General Issues Operating System: Windows 2000 PHP Version: 5.2.5 Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: With regard to the need for a delimiter, I guess that, like Arne, I'm wondering why we couldn't just use the newline character for that purpose. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-12-12 23:24:38] dwake at box dot com If I use shell_exec(), is there any way to get the exit code? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-12-12 23:18:52] rasmus@php.net If you want the raw unaltered output from the command use shell_exec() not exec(). By definition exec() has to use a delimiter in order to create the array. If you don't want it to do that, just grab the raw via shell_exec() and do your own parsing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-12-12 23:08:08] dwake at box dot com I've just run into this "feature", writing a tool that needs to be able to read in a file from a given commit repo. Because of the "feature", every line in the resulting file is stripped of trailing whitespace, creating a lot of spurious diffs. I am at a loss to see the motivation for this behavior. Information is being discarded, with no possibility of recovering it. The only workaround I can think of is to 1. Use sed, or a comparable utility, to add a non-whitespace character to the end of every line 2. Make the PHP exec() call 3. In PHP, strip the spurious character from the end of each line. Please put in the extra flag to turn this behavior off. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2008-07-18 16:02:08] jani@php.net Reclassified. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2008-07-18 14:28:05] Arne dot Heizmann at csr dot com This is most certainly not expected behaviour, and furthermore, it is dataloss. If you must preserve backwards compatibility, which is certainly fair, then I recommend you add a new boolean option to the exec() call to preserve the whitespace. Either way, this bug is not bogus. I have an application whose output may or may not contain lines that contain only whitespace. I need for this whitespace to be preserved as otherwise I cannot parse the output correctly. Please note that I'm not talking about the trailing "\n" which is mentioned in the documentation. I'm referring to all other whitespace, especially spaces and tabs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=43908 -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=43908&edit=1