How to execute and get content of a .php file in a variable?

Question

I want to get contents of a .php file in a variable on other page.

I have two files, myfile1.php and myfile2.php.

myfile2.php

<?PHP
    $myvar="prashant"; // 
    echo $myvar;
?>

Now I want to get the value echoed by the myfile2.php in an variable in myfile1.php, I have tried the follwing way, but its taking all the contents including php tag () also.

<?PHP
    $root_var .= file_get_contents($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/myfile2.php", true);
?>

Please tell me how I can get contents returned by one PHP file into a variable defined in another PHP file.

Thanks

Answer 1

You have to differentiate two things:

• Do you want to capture the output (echo, print,...) of the included file and use the output in a variable (string)?
• Do you want to return certain values from the included files and use them as a variable in your host script?

Local variables in your included files will always be moved to the current scope of your host script - this should be noted. You can combine all of these features into one:

include.php

$hello = "Hello";
echo "Hello World";
return "World";

host.php

ob_start();
$return = include 'include.php'; // (string)"World"
$output = ob_get_clean(); // (string)"Hello World"
// $hello has been moved to the current scope
echo $hello . ' ' . $return; // echos "Hello World"

The return-feature comes in handy especially when using configuration files.

config.php

return array(
    'host' => 'localhost',
     ....
);

app.php

$config = include 'config.php'; // $config is an array

EDIT

To answer your question about the performance penalty when using the output buffers, I just did some quick testing. 1,000,000 iterations of ob_start() and the corresponding $o = ob_get_clean() take about 7.5 seconds on my Windows machine (arguably not the best environment for PHP). I'd say that the performance impact should be considered quite small...