How to assign the contents of a file to a variable in PHP

Question

I have a document file containing HTML markup. I want to assign the contents of the entire file to a PHP variable.

I have this line of code:

$body = in

Answer 1

If there is PHP code that needs to be executed, you do indeed need to use include. However, include will not return the output from the file; it will be emitted to the browser. You need to use a PHP feature called output buffering: this captures all the output sent by a script. You can then access and use this data:

ob_start();                      // start capturing output
include('email_template.php');   // execute the file
$content = ob_get_contents();    // get the contents from the buffer
ob_end_clean();                  // stop buffering and discard contents