Assigning contents to a variable with include/require_once

Question

Is it possible to do like

$var = require_once('lol.php');

so that any HTML output that lol.php does will go inside $var?

I know about output buffering, but is there some special built-in function that already does this?

Answer 1

$var = require_once('lol.php'); will only put the return value of the file into $var. If you don't return anything from it, it'll just be null.

If you want the output you will need to use output buffering:

ob_start();
require_once('lol.php');
$var = ob_get_clean();

Answer 2

The assignment from an =include() call will only get you a possible return value from that script, not any output.

To make this possible you would have to modify the include script to capture the output:

 <?php
      ob_start();

      ...

      return ob_get_clean();
 ?>