Question

For example if I had the script:

<?php

     $page = "My Page";
     echo "<title>" . $page . "</title>";
     require_once('header.php');
     require_once('content.php');
     require_once('footer.php');


?>

Is there something I can add to the bottom of that page to show the entire pre-compiled php?

I want to literally echo the php code, and not compile it.

So in my browser I would see the following in code form…

// stuff from main php
$page = "My Page";
echo "<title>" . $page . "</title>";

// stuff from require_once('header.php');
$hello = "Welcome to my site!";
$name = "Bob";
echo "<div>" . $hello . " " . $name . "</div>";

// stuff from require_once('content.php');
echo "<div>Some kool content!!!!!</div>";

// stuff from require_once('footer.php');
$footerbox = "<div>Footer</div>";
echo $footerbox;

Is this possible?

Answer 1

There’s no way to do it native to PHP, but you could try to hack it if you just wanted something extremely simplistic and non-robust:

<?php
$php = file_get_contents($_GET['file']);

$php = preg_replace_callback('#^\s*(?:require|include)(?:_once)?\((["\'])(?P<file>[^\\1]+)\\1\);\s*$#m', function($matches) {
    $contents = file_get_contents($matches['file']);
    return preg_replace('#<\?php(.+?)(?:\?>)?#s', '\\1', $contents);
}, $php);

echo '<pre>', htmlentities($php), '</pre>';

Notes:

• Warning: Allowing arbitrary file parsing like I’ve done with the fist line is a security hole. Do your own authentication, path restricting, etc.
• This is not recursive (though it wouldn’t take much more work to make it so), so it won’t handle included files within other included files and so on.
• The regex matching is not robust, and very simplistic.
• The included files are assumed to be statically named, within strings. Things like include($foo); or include(__DIR__ . '/foo.php'); will not work.

Disclaimer: Essentially, to do this right, you need to actually parse the PHP code. I only offer the above because it was an interesting problem and I was bored.