Execute a PHP file, and return the result as a string

Question

Let\'s assume I have the following file - template.php:

Answer 1

This should do it:

ob_start();
include('template.php');
$returned = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

Answer 2

If you don't need to do this within PHP, you could execute a php script from the command line, and pipe it to a text file, like so:

php -f phpFile.php > output.html