Limited return value from python to php

Question

I am calling the python script from php using the following command

$url = "https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-your-redis-installation-on-ubuntu-14-04";
$output = shell_exec('python PythonScripts/readable.py '.$url);
echo($output);

When I run the file using commandline

python extractor.py https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-your-redis-installation-on-ubuntu-14-04

I am getting the desired output.

The contents of python file are

import sys
from readability.readability import Document
from urllib import FancyURLopener

class MyOpener(FancyURLopener):
    version = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.8.1.11)'

myopener = MyOpener()
request = myopener.open(sys.argv[1])
html = request.read()

readable_article = Document(html).summary()
readable_title = Document(html).short_title()

print readable_article #If I use readable_title then it's getting printed in php

The problem is that readable_article is not captured by php. But when I use command line both readable_article and readable_title are printed out.

What can be the issue? I tried with exec(), system() and still no luck.

Answer 1

There can be multiple issues:

• Different user's (execution permissions for the python script)
• Fullpath to python interpreter and script ('/usr/bin/python ~/PythonScripts/readable.py')
• ...

You could use popen instead of shell_exec, to make debugging easier. That results in numeric return value, stdout and stderr.

Answer 2

I finally found the issue. The problem was that the python script was giving out the error

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2014' in position 3102: ordinal not in range(128)

I fixed the issue by using either one of the below
readable_article = Document(html).summary().encode('utf8')
readable_article = Document(html).summary().encode('ascii', 'replace')