Output of PHP page to email

[Anon]

Hi,

I was using a shopping cart in Perl with a lot of PUT_param_HERE in template files and a lot of s/PUT_param_HERE/$param/ inside a "parser". It was getting really unefficient, so I decided to move to PHP (First impression: how easy it is!)

There's one thing I was doing in Perl that I don't know how to do in PHP. I had templates of emails and I was using the "parser" to create the emails I was then sending. The problem is that with PHP, the page goes out "directly". Is there a way to have a PHP page and catch the resulting HTML page?

One solution I thought of is getting the page I want to send via HTTP and copy it to the email. Does anyone have another solution ?

Olivier

[[deleted]]

Well, I don't understand what you mean by "getting the page I want to send via HTTP and copy it to the email", but here is my suggestion:

Everytime you are outputting something throughout your PHP, do something like this:

$outputhtml .= "your text...";

At the end, do
print $outputhtml;
AND if you want this output e-mailed, call the mail function:

mail("[e-mail]", "Subject goes here", $outputhtml, "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\n");

So this way, a HTML e-mail will be sent to [e-mail] containing the output generated by the PHP script.

-sridhar

[Anon]

Hi Sridhar

Well, I don't understand what you mean
by "getting the page I want to send via
HTTP and copy it to the email",
...

What I mean is that my PHP program could
act as a client, and call the page using HTTP. But I suppose this would not be very efficient...

Olivier

[mooky]

you could do this ( I think it's what you're after).

ob_start( ); // start output buffering

// do stuff

$Buffer = ob_get_contents( ); // get the output

ob_end_clean( ); // stop output buffering

mail( "to@address", "Subject", $Buffer );

[ogeorg]

Thanks Scott,

Yes, it's exactly what I needed.

Olivier