10Feb/09Off
PHP: How to capture output of echo into a local variable.
I've been customizing a WordPress install and have been needing to capture the output of the bloginfo() function, which simply echo's a string. I wanted to capture the echo into a variable without actually echo'ing the string. You can do so by leveraging PHP's output buffering functions. Here's how you do it:
ob_start();
echo 'Hello World';
$myStr = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
$myStr will now contain 'Hello World' without actually outputting it to the screen.
Reference:
June 14th, 2009 - 16:44
Thanks, just saved me a lot of time and effort figuring this out for myself. I didn’t know where to look in the php documentation for such functions!
Andrew
July 13th, 2009 - 09:33
Simply use get_bloginfo() instead.
July 21st, 2009 - 10:27
@wp_user, thanks for that tip. The specific WordPress example I used was to illustrate how to do the general task of capturing the output of echo() into a local variable.
October 9th, 2009 - 08:59
Thanks, I needed to capture the output of a plugin to replace some text before it was displayed, and your code works great
October 13th, 2009 - 04:04
This has helped me. Thanks
January 18th, 2010 - 17:17
Bravo! This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing and saving me some precious time!
February 23rd, 2010 - 10:09
Great help, this is exactly what I needed working on a shopping cart that was grabbing info from 3 databases, thank you.
August 20th, 2010 - 10:34
Excellent demonstration. I needed to capture the echo outputs from within a bunch of includes, this is precisely what I was looking for. Thanks for posting(and posting reference links – very helpful).
October 13th, 2010 - 12:03
Thanks! This helped alot when modifying a MediaWiki theme.
February 1st, 2011 - 16:26
Dude! thanks a lot! you just saved me hours of banging my head against the wall!!!