How do I execute PHP that is stored in a MySQL database?

Question

I'm trying to write a page that calls PHP that's stored in a MySQL database. The page that is stored in the MySQL database contains PHP (and HTML) code which I want to run on page load.

How could I go about doing this?

Answer 1

You can use the eval command for this. I would recommend against this though, because there's a lot of pitfalls using this approach. Debugging is hard(er), it implies some security risks (bad content in the DB gets executed, uh oh).

See When is eval evil in php? for instance. Google for Eval is Evil, and you'll find a lot of examples why you should find another solution.

Addition: Another good article with some references to exploits is this blogpost. Refers to past vBulletin and phpMyAdmin exploits which were caused by improper Eval usage.