php.py

I wrote something rather fun today and I thought that I'd share it here. It's a Python module that you can use to interact with PHP products. Specifically, it's a reproduction of PHP's http_build_query() and parse_ini_file() functions that act as PHP does according to PHP's own way of doing things.

This means that if you've written an API server (as we have) in PHP that makes use of things like the above, you can interact with it using Python as your scripting language with little effort.

Examples:

from php import parse_ini_file

config = parse_ini_file("/path/to/config.ini")
print config["sectionName"]["keyName"]

This would give you the value for keyName in the section called sectionName in your config.ini file.

from php import http_build_query

somedata = {
  "keyname": "valuename",
  "otherkey": 123,
  "anotherkey": [1,2,3,{"seven": "eight"}]
}
print http_build_query(somedata)

This would give you:

otherkey=123&keyname=valuename&anotherkey[1]=2&anotherkey[0]=1&anotherkey[3][seven]=eight&anotherkey[2]=3&

The code was fun to write, and I'm guessing that it'll be useful to others so I'm posting it here. If you do end up using it, lemme know by posting a comment here eh?

You can download it here: php.py.

When I mentioned this to some other coworkers, they pointed out that I'm not the only one trying to get some of PHP's odd functionality into Python. Another developer has mimicked PHP's serialize() functions in the form of a Python module. I wonder if there are any other cases where this kind of stuff might be useful.