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

You should be using file_get_contents():

$body1 = file_get_contents('email_template.php');

include is including and executing email_template.php in your current file, and storing the return value of include() to $body1.

If you need to execute PHP code inside the of file, you can make use of output control:

ob_start();
include 'email_template.php';
$body1 = ob_get_clean();