I'm trying to send out a voucher, via the PHP's email() function, where I reference an external .php file using include() as the message contents. Heres the code:
$message = '<?php include ("/fullpath/inc/voucher.php"); ?>';
This isn't working because I'm declaring it as a text string, but if I don't it will just print out the contents and not put it as the content of the variable. Any ideas?
You can use the ob_buffer for that, try this:
<?php
ob_start(); // start buffer
include("file.php"); // read in buffer
$var=ob_get_contents(); // get buffer content
ob_end_clean(); // delete buffer content
echo $var; // use $var
?>
Example from http://www.webmaster-eye.de/include-in-Variable-umleiten.210.artikel.html (German)
In this post two solutions depending on the circumstances will be described..
voucher.php is returning a valueIf voucher.php has a return statement in it you can safely use include to get a hold of this returned value.
See the below example:
voucher.php
<?php
$contents = "hello world!";
...
return $contents;
?>
...
$message = include ("/fullpath/inc/voucher.php");
voucher.php is printing data that I'd like to store in a variableIf voucher.php is printing data that you'd like to store in a variable you can use php's output buffering functions to store away the printed data and then assign it to $message.
ob_start ();
include ("/fullpath/inc/voucher.php");
$message = ob_get_contents ();
ob_end ();
ob_start();
include ("/fullpath/inc/voucher.php");
$message = ob_get_clean();
However output buffering in most cases is considered as bad practice and not recommended to use
Like in your case you better have a function declared in voucher.php that returns the message as a string. So all the code could be as simple as: $message = get_voucher();
I've encountered the same ploblem, here is the functions that resolves the problem for me. It uses the Tobiask answer
function call_plugin($target_) { // $target_ is the path to the .PHP file
ob_start(); // start buffer
include($target_); // read in buffer
$get_content = ob_get_contents(); // get buffer content
ob_end_clean();
return $get_content;
}
You want to use the readfile() function instead of include.
See: http://en.php.net/manual/en/function.readfile.php
If you want to get the =results= of PHP parsing the voucher.php one way is to make sure that you put voucher.php on a reachable URL, and then call it like:
$message = file_get_contents("http://host.domain.com/blabla/voucher.php");
This would insert the contents/output of the parsed voucher.php into the variable $message.
If you can't reach the voucher.php publically you have to rewrite it to output the string in the end with the return() function, or write a function in voucher.php that outputs the string you want when called after which you include() it and call the function from within this master PHP script.
$message = include '/fullpath/inc/voucher.php';
and withing /fullpath/inc/voucher.php
// create $string;
return $string;
$message=file_get_contents("/fullpath/inc/voucher.php");
