Saving HTML output from a local PHP file to a string using file_get_contents

Question

There is a header.php file and contains some php codes that return HTML. I know that I can use require, include for echoing results, but I want to save the processed output string to a variable.

On the page, I used:

$headerHTML=file_get_contents('header.php'); 

Then I got the output of the PHP code, not the processed HTML output. I know adding http: // will help. But I prefer to use a relative path, how can I say that the function correctly processes the php file?

Note. I would like to continue to use this file_get_contents statement, rather than using ob_start() if possible.

Answer 1

I would rather use require() wrapped inside ob_start() and ob_get_clean() . I am sure there is nothing wrong with this approach.

Answer 2

Do not use eval() - this is evil!

Use a relative local path to automatically map it to an absolute URL .

Answer 3

If the URL wrappers are included and you want to get the header.php file (and you do not want to save the session state), you can use $headerHTML=file_get_contents('http://yourdomain.tld/path/to/header.php'); although why would you like to do this, it eludes me. Are you sure you are not trying to do something that can be easily solved using templates and caching?

Answer 4

You can check out http://in2.php.net/manual/en/function.eval.php#56641 , hope this helps.