Question

I have a PHP generated page containing the results of a submitted form, what I would like to do is save this as a .doc file on the server.
After some googling I came across this code which I adapted:-

$myFile = "./dump/".$companyName."/testFile.doc";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
$stringData = "Bobby Bopper\n";
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
$stringData = "Tracy Tanner\n";
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
fclose($fh);

But the problem with this is that I would have to recreate the results in order to manually write them to the file and it doesn’t seem very efficient.

So I continued to google and found the PHP manual which left me scratching my head frankly, however I eventually found this:-

ob_start();
// code to generate page.
$out = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
// or write it to a file.
file_put_contents("./dump/".$companyName."/testFile.doc",$out);

Which will create the file, but doesn’t write anything to it. However this seems to be the way to do what (Based on the PHP manual) I want even if I can’t get it to work!

Any advice? I don’t mind googling if I can figure out a decent search term 🙂

Answer 1

This sould do it for you:

$cache = 'path/to/your/file';

ob_start();

// your content goes here...
echo "hello !"; // would put hello into your file

$page = ob_get_contents(); 

ob_end_clean(); 

$fd = fopen("$cache", "w"); 

    if ($fd) {

    fwrite($fd,$page); 

    fclose($fd);

}

It’s also a great way to cache dynamic pages. Hope it helps.