How do I include php within php?

Question

I want to include:

<?php the_field('200_200_1', 'option'); ?>

before the opening div tag in the line below...

$output .= '<div class="datebarcolor">'.$dates4.'</div>';

I am not sure how to insert the php tag in these circumstances. This is a php file, btw.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

If you're using ACF in wordpress you can use get_field() over the_field() in order to store the output in your $output variable:

$output .= get_field('200_200_1', 'option');
$output .= '<div class="databarcolor">' . $date4 . '</div>';

Answer 2

If you want to include the output of some other PHP code (for instance, if the_field does some echo calls) and you want to add that to the $output variable, use ob_start and ob_get_clean, like so:

ob_start();
the_field('200_200_1', 'option');
$output .= ob_get_clean(); //This appends everything to $output that was echoed since the call to ob_start
$output .= '<div class="datebarcolor">'.$dates4.'</div>';

Answer 3

I think you either mean:

Include the file before executing this code:

include 'yourfile.php';

// ... some code ...
$output .= '<div class="datebarcolor">'.$dates4.'</div>';

or include the file and add it's output to $output:

// start output buffer
ob_start();
include 'yourfile.php';

// get buffer contents and clean the buffer
$output .= ob_get_clean();

$output .= '<div class="datebarcolor">'.$dates4.'</div>';