Question

I’m trying to define a string as a combination of hard coded characters and of the contents of another file. What I have tried is this.

$html = "<h1>
           ".file_get_contents("file.php", TRUE)."
        <h1>";

The problem is that only raw text is being returned from file.php. Whatever it is that PHP is supposed to echo isn’t being echoed..

Answer 1

You need output buffering to do that:

function generate_h1()
{
    ob_start();
    include('file.php');

    return '<h1>' . ob_get_clean() . '</h1>';
}

$html = generate_h1();

See also: ob_start() ob_get_clean()