get php dynamically generated html code as a string

Question

This is generic PHP question not just oscommerce.

In the old version of oscommerce a column was displayed by creating a object of a PHP class. If i include this it gets displayed

new infoBox2($info_box_contents) ;

But in new version i don't have the liberty of doing this because of a lot of reasons. i MUST return all the HTML code generated by creating the above object as a string. This is what the string is right now -

$data = '<div class="ui-widget infoBoxContainer">' .'  <div class="ui-widget-header infoBoxHeading">' . MODULE_BOXES_CATEGORIES_BOX_TITLE . '</div>' .'  <div class="ui-widget-content infoBoxContents">' . $categories_string . '</div>' .'</div>';

You can notice it is predefined HTML code. I need to change the $data value to the dynamically generated HTML code generated when the object is created. Any ideas on how to do this? i tried type casting the object as a string and using var_dump

var_dump is giving something like this

object(infoBox2)#8 (7) { ["table_border"]=> string(1) "0" ["table_width"]=> string(4) "100%" ["table_cellspacing"]=> string(1) "0" ["table_cellpadding"]=> string(1) "0" ["table_parameters"]=> string(22) " class="infoBox_table"" ["table_row_parameters"]=> string(0) "" ["table_data_parameters"]=> string(19) " class="infoBox_td"" }

which is not exactly the HTML code for it.

All that matters here is getting the HTML code generated by the PHP code as a string.HOW DO I DO IT?

If i place the new object creation in a seperate file and use file_get_contents then will it return the PHP code itself or will it return the HTML code generated by the php. Note here that i will be passing the filepath NOT a URL. I can't pass the URL because of oscommerce internals which i will not go in depth now. i will use something Like this :-

file_get_contents("myfile.php");

NOT

file_get_contents("http://mywebsite.com/myfile.php");

Answer 1

You can use the technique called "output buffering".

# start redirecting output to a buffer
ob_start();

# execute the other PHP file
include('myfile.php');

# grab whatever got output since ob_start() (and stop buffering)
$html = ob_get_clean();