How do I call a block in a phtml instead of through a layout?

Question

I have disabled layout for the wishlist block:

<block type="catalog/product_view" name="product.info.addtoto" as="addtoto" template="catalog/product/view/addto.phtml"/>

I now want to call that block in the phtml instead of add it to another layout.

How do I call it directly?

Answer 1

While Prattski is correct that this is poor form (am I'm upvoting as such), there have been times when developing when either this has been a valuable debugging technique, or it made the difference of several hours of programming. In that spirit, this is the bad habit way of doing it:

<?php print $this->getLayout()
                 ->createBlock("catalog/product_view")
                 ->setTemplate("catalog/product/view/addto.phtml")
                 ->toHtml(); ?>

Use sparingly, if at all.