Can't render output to screen using PHP?

Question

I have the following scenario.

I have a PHP website witch contains about 3 webpages with dynamic content. I want to render this to static content to another file. Eg. contact.php -> contact.html

My code looks like this

ob_start();
$content = require_once 'contact.php';
ob_end_flush();
file_put_contents("contact.html", $content);

Somehow this is not working ;-?(

Answer 1

require_once() doesn't return the content outputted by a script. You need to get the script output that is stored in the output buffer:

ob_start();
require_once('contact.php');
$content = ob_get_clean();

file_put_contents('contact.html', $content);

ob_get_clean():

Gets the current buffer contents and delete current output buffer.

ob_get_clean() essentially executes both ob_get_contents() and ob_end_clean().

http://php.net/ob_get_clean