Question

I’m trying to send out a voucher, via the PHP’s email() function, where I reference an external .php file using include() as the message contents. Heres the code:

$message = '<?php include ("/fullpath/inc/voucher.php"); ?>';

This isn’t working because I’m declaring it as a text string, but if I don’t it will just print out the contents and not put it as the content of the variable. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You want to use the readfile() function instead of include.
See: http://en.php.net/manual/en/function.readfile.php

If you want to get the =results= of PHP parsing the voucher.php one way is to make sure that you put voucher.php on a reachable URL, and then call it like:

$message = file_get_contents("http://host.domain.com/blabla/voucher.php");

This would insert the contents/output of the parsed voucher.php into the variable $message.

If you can’t reach the voucher.php publically you have to rewrite it to output the string in the end with the return() function, or write a function in voucher.php that outputs the string you want when called after which you include() it and call the function from within this master PHP script.