Sending the output of a function to a variable.

[TrickyPhillips]

Is it possible to pass the output of a function to a variable, as is possible in Unix shells?

IE:

$string = `echo "Hello, world!";`
echo $string;


(Should display the data in '$string', which would be "Hello, world!")

[NogDog]

Your example will work fine (at least on a UNIX/Linux host) if you straighten out the punctuation:

$string = `echo "Hello, world!"`;
echo $string;

[TrickyPhillips]

Thanks for the fast response.

Why doesn't this work when used with include()?

[NogDog]

Not sure what you mean. Strictly speaking, include is not a function and does not return anything (although you can terminate an included file with a return() statement, at which point it will then return whatever argument you supply to that return).

[TrickyPhillips]

Well, I was hoping to use PHP's 'include' function to send the contents of another webpage to a variable.

I wanted to do something like this:

$contents = `include("http://www.website.com/page.html")`;

What would be a good method of doing such? Unfortunately, the 'file' function only seems to work with local documents.

[leatherback]

Have a look at fopen in the manual: www.php.net/fopen

It lists a class for doing this thing in the user comments, and an overview of other useful functions.

[NogDog]

$contents = file_get_contents("http://www.website.com/page.html");