Question

I have the following code:

<? 
$serverurl = $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"];
$file = $serverurl.'/demo/sample_php.php';
$newfile = $serverurl.'/demo/sample_php.txt';
if (!copy($file, $newfile)) {
    echo "failed to copy $file...\n";
}
$homepage = file_get_contents($serverurl.'/demo/sample_php.txt');
?>

<pre class="code">
    <code class="php boc-html-script">
        <? echo htmlentities($homepage, ENT_QUOTES); ?>
        </code>
</pre>
<? unlink($newfile); ?>

This basically copies a *.php file to a *.txt file, displays the contents, then deletes it. However, I don’t want to create a visible file, as the application is designed to display a list of files, then display the contents of the file. Having a file appear with a .txt extension would be confusing.

I realize I could create a folder that is hidden, and do all my converting there, but I am thinking there must be a more efficient way to display the contents of a php file.

I did some experimenting with tmpfile(), but I couldn’t get the contents of the php file to write to it.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

There is no reason to do the file copy. file_get_contents() returns the contents of the file as a string, which is all you need. It will not parse and execute the PHP code as include()/require() would.

Just retrieve the contents of the PHP file into the $homepage variable and echo it out as you have done with the temporary text file.

<?php
// get the PHP file directly.
$homepage = file_get_contents($serverurl.'/demo/sample_php.php');
?>
<pre class="code">
    <code class="php boc-html-script">
        <?php echo htmlentities($homepage, ENT_QUOTES); ?>
    </code>
</pre>

After suggestions in the comments to print with highlighting, you can do it more easily with highlight_file():

highlight_file($serverurl.'/demo/sample_php.php');