Question

I am writing a PHP script that will send via a cron an email every night. In this script, I have multiple functions which output particular text. I am then trying to send the contents of those functions in the email. For some reason the email is going through fine, but the body of the content is showing up empty. If there’s a better way to do this, by all means I’m open to it.

function function1() {
    global $new;
    echo "<p>";
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) $content = $row["COUNT(column1)"];
    if ($content != 0) echo "output1";
    else echo "output2";
    echo "</p>";
}
$emailMessage = function1().function2().function3();

if ($_GET['version'] == "email") {
    mail ($emailTo, $emailSubject, stripslashes($emailMessage));
}
else echo $emailMessage;

Obviously the code is obfuscated a bit, but the general outline is there.

Answer 1

echo sends the output to the standard out, it doesn’t return it from the function. Try this.

ob_start()

// run function contents, including echo

var message = ob_get_clean();
return message;

This will capture what you echo into the buffer, prevent the buffer from being sent, and then reading the buffer into a variable. It will then empty the buffer ready for next time.