I'm trying to list the contents of a file on a webpage. I'm using php to do a shell_exec of a cat command. The result seems to remove all line breaks. Cat on the commandline however displays the results appropriately.

On the command line:
Results in the below (with line breaks):

__stream2__out1__ rtmp://myserver.com
__stream1__out4__ rtmp://server2.com

However, on the webpage, I get the same but without line breaks.
__stream2__out1__ rtmp://myserver.com __stream1__out4__ rtmp://server2.com

The webpage php code is below.

this is very likely the wrong way to go about it.
i'm 99.99% sure that PHP has native functions for that.

As ondoho suggests, there are better ways to dump a file in PHP.

In general, if you are displaying plain text the MIME type needs be "text/plain" as in

Or if you need HTML around it for the rest of the page, wrap the output of the file in a <pre> </pre> element.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/elements.html

https://www.iana.org/assignments/med...ia-types.xhtml

http://php.net/manual/en/funcref.php

1 members found this post helpful.

As per your suggestion, modified the code to do this:
<?php
if (isset($_GET['list'])) {
echo file_get_contents( "../scripts/1data.txt" ); // get the contents, and echo it out.
}

But still getting output minus newlines.

If you're echoing/dumping to a web page, note that newlines are not seen by web browsers. If you look at the page source, the newlines are probably there, but the browser is not going to show them.

You'll need to add a <br> tag in your code, or <pre></pre> as suggested by Turbocapitalist.

Thanks. pre tag worked.
$output = file_get_contents( "../scripts/1data.txt" );
echo "<pre>$output</pre>";

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