include or function as variable

[Anon]

Newbie question: I'm using fwrite to output PHP results to a text file. This is working fine, but fwrite only takes a string as an argument. I want to stick some big blocks of HTML code in my output. I usually use include for this, but in order to pass to fwrite, I need to include a file and have its contents become a variable. In other words, something like:

include "filename.txt";
$fp = fopen ("outfile.html", "aw");
fwrite($fp, "$header");
fwrite($fp, "some text");
fclose ($fp);

Obviously that won't work, but it would work if the contents of the include could be assigned to $header. But how?

Thanks for a clue.

• Scot

[Anon]

i'm not sure i understand your question. http://www.zend.com/zend/tut/using-strings.php is a good strings tutorial. you can assign variables a couple ways but you might be looking for "here docs." they are assigned:

$head = <<<ENDH
bunches of text with $variables being interpeted

ENDH;

where the H in ENDH is whatever letter you want. you can also code and just escape
}?>
HTML stuff
<?{
then resume coding.
-nm

[Anon]

Sorry, let me try to clarify. Say you've got an HTML header you need to use in lots of different scripts, and that HTML header contains the body background color. Now you want to redesign the site and change the color. By having that header in an include, you just change the include file and all the scripts use it automatically.

In my case, I'm outputting static HTML files with fwrite(). Because fwrite() only takes strings (which might include variables), I want to assign the contents of an include file to a variable, so I can spit it out again with fwrite(). I can't see a way to do this without putting the actual header data into each script.

Hope that makes sense. Thanks,

Scot

[Anon]

Nevermind, I've solved the problem. Includes I had worked with before were just straight html blocks. In this case, I needed to make the include file a PHP document with a variable assignment. Thanks and sorry for the wasted bandwidth.