Question

I need to display the content of another page from a function using return.
What is the best way to do this?

Say that I have file.php. In my script in another page, I want to call a function and return the contents of file.php.

For example:

myFunction() {
  $page = WHAT('file.php');
  return $page;
}

What to use in place of ‘WHAT’? I’ve tried include, because it’s what I know, but it doesn’t work here.

EXTRA NOTES: This is used in a Drupal module. The admin theme / menu displays as normal if I use $page = 'insert code here'; return $page; – but not if I use $page = include('file.php'); because the function doesn’t even use the return when it sees 'include'.

Answer 1

1. for code or content of file use: file_get_contents

2. for instant result of another php page, you can try ob_start and ob_get_clean.

It will gather the output of the included file in memory and later you can gather the output to variable and clean the memory or just show the output directly.

like:

myFunction(){
   ob_start();
   include('file.php');
   $page = ob_get_clean();
   return $page;
}