Can you render a PHP file into a variable?

Question

If I have a hello.php file like this:

Hello, !

I would like to do something like this in some php code:

Answer 1

You could use some function like this:

function renderPhpToString($file, $vars=null)
{
    if (is_array($vars) && !empty($vars)) {
        extract($vars);
    }
    ob_start();
    include $file;
    return ob_get_clean();
}

It uses the output buffer control function ob_start() to buffer the following output until it’s returned by ob_get_clean().

Edit    Make sure that you validate the data passed to this function so that $vars doesn’t has a file element that would override the passed $file argument value.