asigning PHP output to a variable??

[rudiger]

I need to capture the output of a php script and assign it to a variable (string) for later use. something along the lines of

$string = include 'script.php';

except this doesn't work. Any help would be appreciated.

[PyroX]

More info please.

You could do this:

$output=file("http://www.yoursite.com/path/to/script.php");

Where $output is an array , each line of output an item.

[rudiger]

Well I'm writing an invoicing section for my company's website and I need to email the invoice to the customer. I want to email them a small portion of the invoice screen as seen on the site (a quote template defined in script a named "quote_body.php")

So I wanted to store the parsed output of 'quote_body.php' in a variable called $emailBody to be used when I call mail().

I can't use your method because 'qoute_body' relies on some POST variables.

Any suggestions??

[PyroX]

Switch your 'post' to 'get', and put the for vars in the file() function.

$output=file("http://www.yoursite.com/path/to/script.php?id=xxx&user=xxx&trans=xxx&ect=ect");

[Weedpacket]

You could also use the output buffering functions (starting, reasonably enough I suppose, with [man]ob_start[/man]). Run the same script to produce the invoice in both cases (put it in a separate function, say, and then you can use it for both on-screen and in-email invoice generation). Capture the output into a variable, empty the buffer, turn off buffering, and proceed as normal to produce a visible results.

[PyroX]

I like Weedpacket's Idea, research that, it is much cleaner, more complicated, but in the end, cleaner.

[rudiger]

I think I may have to give the output buffering method a shot ( Things will get a bit ugly using GETs). I'd read a little about ouput buffering but was reluctant cos I hadn't used it before and I'll have to edit php.ini to enable it (i know i'm lazy). I just thought PHP would have a simple fix.

Thanks for your help guys.