parsing php to make static html pages

itsakoo

Hi, I want to generate a static html page from a php page and i'm trying to figure out a way to execute the php code and output the results to a file.

What I want is something like eval() but where I can store the output to a variable.

vsego

How about typing from shell (Linux or Windows Command Prompt - no difference):
path_to_php/php your_file.php > static_file.html

For lots of files, you can generate shell script (or batch file) doing all these calls.

Btw, under Linux, I think PHP has to be compiled as CGI to do this.

Also, for only few pages, you can always call the page in browser and use "Save as". :-)

mickro

Pete,

You can get the plain HTML from a PHP page and write to a static page by using the file and fwrite functions.

eg/

$html = file("http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.php");

$fp = fopen("mypage.htm","w");

for ($x=0;$x < count($html);$x++) {
fwrite($fp,$html[$x] . "\n");
}

fclose($fp);

This will write the plain HTML contents of mypage.php to a file called mypage.htm

HTH

Mike
www.digitalegg.net

itsakoo

Hi,

Thankyou for your response. What i'm actually trying to do is to generate content for an html email based on the input from a bunch of forms. The problem is that I want to be able to give the user tha ability to preview the content in their browser before commiting to it being emailed.

To do this i'm (or want to atleast) passing the php and saving it as html in a temp file, opening the temp file in the browser so the user can verify it, and then on confirmation by the user, feeding the temp file to mail().

Can't do it at the command line as the script needs to be called by a form and doing a save in the browser will save the output to the client and i need it on the server.

Pete.

itsakoo

Hi Mike,

I tried this way, but I need to be able to pass variables to the php file and couldn't find a way of doing it. Tried putting them in as a query string but fopen() didn't like it. Any ideas?

Pete.

itsakoo

Hi Mike,

Actually i didn't try it exactly this way, I've been trying to open a file from the file system. Just tried it again using url and I can pass it variables in the query string.

Cheers mate, your a star 🙂

Pete.