<p>I started using subversion for one of my projects and it would be absolutely amazing if I could just export the latest version from the repository on my production server by for example running a php or perl script.</p>

<p>The production site is hosted with a shared hosting provider who doesn't allow shell access or for example the php <a href="http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>exec()</code></a> function. (I don't know much about perl; I only know that my hoster allows perl and custom cgi scripts).</p>

<p>Is it possible to perform a SVN export in this environment?</p>

SVN supports access over WebDAV (i.e. HTTPS). This means for simple read access you don't actually need an SVN client to access an SVN repository. You can even use a web browser, or in your case any PHP function that accepts a URL as its argument. SVN has to be set up on the server side to work with apache, for more info check out the
svn red book