Reading files

[davidtaylor]

I want to be able to open any specified file on my site, and be able to read the contents.

I was looking at fopen and passthru, but couldn't quite get it to work.

If the user tries opening a .php page, is it possible to read the contents of the page as though it had already been output to the screen? So, for instance, an echo statement would be considered to have been echoed, and thus when reading the file, the word echo wouldn't be seen.

Cheers,
David

[[deleted]]

a) read the manual again, it's all explained in there

b) You can use the eval() function to "execute" lines of php code, but don't ever ever do that with "random" php files or data you got from an html-form.
Eval() executes code asif it is supposed to be part of the script that the eval() command is called from.

so if you were to eval("exit;"); your script would stop.

[davidtaylor]

Where abouts in the manual?
I looked at fopen, passthru, and fread.

Unfortunately, whatever explanation is there, doesn't seem to be clear-enough.

Using passthru, I seem to get PHP access violation errors or HTTP 500 errors.

Using fread followed by strip_tags seems to be the closest I can get.

Hmmmm.