Parsing SSI / SHTML

Anon

I am writing a PHP script that will run a small web site. Its goal is to take static HTML pages and transform them to a templated interface. The problem is that some of the pages use Server Side Includes. Now, I managed to get static HTML files to load from <!-- include directives, but not php files (one of the HTML files actually includes a separate PHP file). I know I should somehow filter this for include() or exec(), but I am not exactly sure what the best course of action is. I would like it to be something like this:

function DoScriptInclude($filename)
{
//Code here (this is what I need help on) that reads / executes the PHP file
return $finalresultofexecutedscript;
}

I know this has probably been discussed before, but I don't see any recent posts on this topic. Thanks for any help!

Anon

Not sure exactly what you mean... What you need to do, I assume, is read in the external PHP file, e.g.:

$filename = "something.php";
$fd = fopen ($filename, "r");
$contents = fread ($fd, filesize ($filename));
fclose ($fd);

And the 'parse' it, with:

eval($contents);

Which will 'run' the PHP code, and set any variables as per the code, etc.

Anon

Thanks, but I think I found an easier way after thinking about it. The problem is that I want to build up a string of the page code before it gets sent to the client. And eval, as far as I can tell, does not return a string. If the PHP code calls "print", then print is actually called. This seems to work:
$contents = join('',file($THISWEBSITEURL.$filename));
return $contents;

where $THISWEBSITEURL is the http://www.whatever.com, and then the filename ("/whatever.php") is added on.

I COULD of done an apcahce virtual() call, but that too would of outputed the code, instead of returning a string

Thanks though!