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

file_get_contents()

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

Or, if you're insane:

ob_start();
include('email_template.php');
$file = ob_end_flush();