Using PHP/Python to access data from a remote telnet server over SSH

I have a CentOS 5.5 server running a local telnet daemon (which is only accessible from localhost) which prints out a list of active users on our accounting system when sent the correct commands through telnet. I need to make this information available on our intranet website which uses PHP.

I've written a Python script using the telnetlib modules to run locally on the CentOS server which simply captures the output of the telnet command and prints them to stdout. I've setup key开发者_StackOverflow社区 based ssh between the web server and the CentOS server to run the python script remotely from the web server. I can execute the script successfully from the web server using ssh and it prints the list of users to stdout on the webserver. I was hoping to be able to execute this SSH command and capture the results into a variable to display on the website.

However, I can't get exec(), shell_exec(), passthru() or any other PHP exec function to display the data. I'm well aware that I may be approaching this from the totally wrong angle! What would be the best way to capture the output from ssh?

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Why don't you redirect your stdout to a file. Then use your php website framework to read the file and display the results