Stefan Fischerländer’s Blog One Blog Is Not Enough

When writing code I really like to have some kind of fast feedback system, like the Smalltalk workspace or the Python IDLE shell. For Perl development I have created a graphical Perl shell for that purpose.

Because I now have to do more and more work with PHP, I’ve been looking for a similiar tool and came across phpa, “an interactive command line shell for PHP” from David Phillips. Unfortunately phpa needs readline which isn’t available on Mac OS X and Windows. (No, of course readline is available, but you have to compile PHP yourself to use it.)

So, I re-worked David’s PHP shell and removed all the fancy readline stuff. Without readline support the shell isn’t as useful as it could be, but at least it now runs on Mac OS X and I think it will also run on Windows systems. This interactive php shell without readline support I call phpa-norl - where the norl part obviously stands for “no readline” support.

Installation

Download the PHP shell file phpa-norl and start it with php phpa-norl.

To mimic the readline support, there is a simple history function in phpa-norl. Entering a single ‘h’ lists the twenty last commands you executed. Appending a number to ‘h’, executes the command with that number in the history list. ‘h0′ for example always re-executes your last command. You can also enter a multi-line statement. If the last character on your input line is a ‘#’, than phpa-norl assumes that there will follow additional code on a new line. To leave the PHP shell, just enter a simple ‘q’ and phpa-norl will exit.

PHP shell usage

Here is a typical phpa-norl session:

macbook:~ sf$ ./phpa-norl
PHP 5.2.0 (cli) (???) [Darwin]
>>> $a=array(17,899,324,234)
>>> $b=array(288,900,1212,2323)
>>> $c=array_merge($a,$b)
>>> sort($c,SORT_NUMERIC)
true
>>> print_r($c)
Array
(
    [0] => 17
    [1] => 234
    [2] => 288
    [3] => 324
    [4] => 899
    [5] => 900
    [6] => 1212
    [7] => 2323
)
>>> $a[]=199
>>> h
History:
[5] => $a=array(17,899,324,234)
[4] => $b=array(288,900,1212,2323)
[3] => $c=array_merge($a,$b)
[2] => sort($c,SORT_NUMERIC)
[1] => print_r($c)
[0] => $a[]=199
>>> h3
>>> $c=array_merge($a,$b)
>>> h
History:
[5] => $a=array(17,899,324,234)
[4] => $b=array(288,900,1212,2323)
[3] => sort($c,SORT_NUMERIC)
[2] => print_r($c)
[1] => $a[]=199
[0] => $c=array_merge($a,$b)
>>> h3
>>> sort($c,SORT_NUMERIC)
true
>>> h
History:
[5] => $a=array(17,899,324,234)
[4] => $b=array(288,900,1212,2323)
[3] => print_r($c)
[2] => $a[]=199
[1] => $c=array_merge($a,$b)
[0] => sort($c,SORT_NUMERIC)
>>> h3
>>> print_r($c)
Array
(
    [0] => 17
    [1] => 199
    [2] => 234
    [3] => 288
    [4] => 324
    [5] => 899
    [6] => 900
    [7] => 1212
    [8] => 2323
)
>>>

Update:
Since PHP 5.1 there is (at last!) a built-in interactive mode as Johannes Schlüter shows in his blog, but this interactive mode needs readline support which isn’t part of the official Windows or Mac OS X builds. phpa-norl addresses anyone who doesn’t like to compile PHP.

Update:
Licence: phpa-norl is, like the original phpa, public domain. Feel free to do with it whatever you want.

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