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 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?
Why don't you redirect your stdout to a file.  Then use your php website framework to read the file and display the results
Using PHP/Python to access data from a remote telnet server over SSH