PHP variables dont show up

[olkhicha_appa]

folks, I am writing a RSS feed as below. You will notice that, in <link> </link> tabs I am trying to output a PHP variable value (which is a URL)Problem is that although I see the value being output OK on commandline execution on the server, e.g. %php  foo.php, when I load the page in the browser, the out put for that variable is empty!! i.e. If I see the page source then I dont see <link>value-of-the-variable</link> instead, the tabs show up as <link> </link>

I am at my wits end on how to get this working.

any ideas?

Btw, if I use any PHP function like so: <link> echo date®</link> then I see the page source in browser as <link>24, Mar 2007 12:00 -6:00 </link>  which is as expected.

-------

<?php

header("Pragma: no-cache");

echo '<' . '?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?' . '>';

ob_start();

echo shell_exec("foo.sh");

$feed = ob_get_contents();

ob_end_clean();

?>

<rss version="2.0">

<channel>

<title>some title</title>

<link><?php echo $foo></link>

<description>Some description</description>

<lastBuildDate><?php echo date®  ?></lastBuildDate>

<language>en-us</language>

<item>

<title>Some title</title>

<link><?php echo $feed ?></link>

<guid><?php echo $feed ?></guid>

<pubDate><?php echo date®?></pubDate>

<description> </description>

</item>

</channel>

</rss>

 

 

 

[shaunrigby]

Change

 

<link><?php echo $foo></link>

 

To

 

<link><?php echo $foo; ?></link>

 

 

[olkhicha_appa]

Tried that but no change.

 

[shaunrigby]

Where is $foo actually defined?

[olkhicha_appa]

I think I found out the problem though I cant explain the reason.

The analysis follows (which also answers your question shaunrigby)

 

$foo is output of shell script like thus:

$foo = `./shell_script`;

Now, the shell_script is nothing but a simple find command which looks for files in directory named on todays date like thus:

 

shell_script:

find `date` -name "foo.txt"

 

So, ultimately, I would like $foo to contain the results of 'find' command.

This was not working.

So after I redirected the results of find to a plain-text file and then did

$foo=`cat results`

It worked.

Is there any better way to do this in PHP itself?