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Asked: 2026-05-27T22:31:46+00:00

I have a simple PHP function that outputs HTML. <?php function get_header() { ?>

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I have a simple PHP function that outputs HTML.

<?php
function get_header() {
?>
<div id="header">
  <div class="page-width">
  <!-- And a lot more HTML after this line. -->
<?php
}
?>

So, when I call get_header(), the function outputs the HTML.

What is the simplest option to tweak this function to return the HTML as a string? Do I need to create a wrapper around this function? In other words, I’d like to be able to do e.g. var html_string = get_header_wrapper(), where html_string contains all the HTML above.

One thing I could think of is to duplicate the function and make it return a string. However, that would be so inefficient because it introduces a lot of code duplicate.

<?php
function get_header_wrapper() {
  var ret = <<<EOD
  <div id="header">
    <div class="page-width">
    <!-- And a lot more HTML after this line. -->
  ...
  EOD;

  return ret;
}
?>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can make use of output bufferingDocs to get the output of that function:

    ob_start();
get_header();
$html = ob_get_clean();

    If you need that more than once, you can wrap it into a function of it’s own:

    /**
 * call a function and return it's output as string.
 * 
 * @param callback $function
 * @param array $arguments (optional)
 * @param var $return (optional) the return value of the callback
 * @return string function output
 */
function ob_get_call($function, array $arguments = array(), &$return = NULL)
{
    ob_start();
    $return = call_user_func_array($function, $arguments);
    $buffer = ob_get_clean();
    return $buffer;
}

    Usage:

    $html = ob_get_call('get_header');

    As the answer is that popular today, here is another function to get the output of an include:

    /**
 * include a file and return it's output as string.
 * 
 * @param string $file
 * @param array $variables (optional) keys as variable names and values as variable values
 * @param var $includeReturn (optional) the return value of the include
 * @return string function output
 */
function ob_get_include($file, array $variables = array(), &$includeReturn = NULL)
{
    $includeFilename = $file;
    unset($file);
    extract($variables);
    unset($variables);
    ob_start();
    $includeReturn = include($includeFilename);
    return ob_get_clean();
}

    Usage:

    include.php:

    <div class="greeting">
    Hello <em><?php echo htmlspecialchars($name); ?></em>!
</div>

    Using:

    $variables = array(
    'name' => 'Marianne',
);
$html = ob_get_include('include.php', $vars);

    Related:

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