Sorry, but your problem does not imply a bug in PHP itself.  For a
list of more appropriate places to ask for help using PHP, please
visit http://www.php.net/support.php as this bug system is not the
appropriate forum for asking support questions.  Due to the volume
of reports we can not explain in detail here why your report is not
a bug.  The support channels will be able to provide an explanation
for you.

Thank you for your interest in PHP.

The function is a direct wrapper around smfi_getsymval() 
milter function. So the fact it does not return anything can 
be traced directly to milter and not PHP.

Hi Iliia,

I confirm it is  bug in PHP and I even provide a fix below ;)
and thus reopen this bug.
In the file  
PHPROOT/sapi/milter/php_milter.c
the last line in the function 
PHP_FUNCTION(smfi_getsymval)
 (i.e. the line
       RETVAL_NULL();
) seems to be always called and thus the function when called in PHP always return NULL.
Although I am not a SAPI expert (nor a C expert BTW) and thus do not understand why it is always called, removing this line and considering each case fixes the bug.

Iliia could you please confirm this?
Thanks
Alex


==== here is an example of code fixing the bug ======

PHP_FUNCTION(smfi_getsymval)
{
        char *symname, *ret;
        int len;

        /* valid in any callback */
        if (MG(state) == MLFI_NONE) {
                /*php_error(E_WARNING, IS_NONE, get_active_function_name(TSRMLS_C));*/
                RETVAL_STRING("MLFI_NONE", 1);
        } else {
                if (zend_parse_parameters(1 TSRMLS_CC, "s", &symname, &len) == SUCCESS) {
                    if ((ret = smfi_getsymval(MG(ctx), symname)) != NULL) {
                           RETVAL_STRING(ret, 1);
                    } else {
                         RETVAL_STRING("isnull", 1);
                    }
                } else {
                RETVAL_STRING("zend_parse_parameters returned FAILURE", 1);
                }
        }
    
}


Note that if I just add again the line 
        RETVAL_NULL();
at the bottom of the function above, I will again get a NULL string all the time.

Please try the next snapshot from http://snaps.php.net, it should be fixed there.
(Though I would not recommend using this SAPI, as it's unmaintained for a long time).

Hi Tony,

I saw you replaced the string
RETVAL_
by the string
RETURN_

in the php_milter.c code.

And I confirm that works *fine* now.
Thank you.

--
Please, please, please, do not remove the SAPI from the distribution. Leaving it as 'experimental' is OK but removing it would be a drama. With that many spam on the Internet, it is *so* cool to be able to use our favorite programming language to fight spam or manipulate mails!
Please don't force me to use C or Perl to talk to sendmail ;)(Even so there is  huge amount of work done with Perl).

I think the SAPI code is relatively small, so not not complicated to maintain. As so many programs already depend on the sendmail milter API, we can hope they won't change it soon.

We, the user base, will keep reporting the bugs we find to keep this part of the code up to date.

I will also try to publish some tutorials on the Internet to let people know about this SAPI.

Thanks again for your help and the very fast fix.

This bug has been fixed in CVS.

Snapshots of the sources are packaged every three hours; this change
will be in the next snapshot. You can grab the snapshot at
http://snaps.php.net/.
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.