hello guys, its has been some times that am working on this project.
I have been using iptables to configure linux as firewall and i' have been using ip, route, ifconfig and tc to make my linux box act as a router.

The aim of my project is to make these configuration much easier, therefore am using a web interface to interact with iptables, ip and route. Am using html and php (using exec to execute the commands) in apache server in order to do this.

To extract information for display, lets say for example i want to display the rules for a chain (root@linux # iptables -L INPUT) am using sed, grep, cut and wc to extract the required info. There is no problem on this side. Everything works fine.

My question is:
> Is there a way that i can interact directly with netfilter to get the rules and any firewall configuration instead of extracting the data from the output.
>same for the router part.
>is there a way to get the information about the network devices (UP/DOWN, ip address, mac, etc) separately.


for short i just want to know if there are system call for this.



Note:
>Please bare with me for writting that much!! But i think i must give as much info possible 4 u to help me.
>I've already have a look at many firewall builder interfaces or linux router available. For my project, i should develop my own!

Thanks in advance for your help.