readfile() says it outputs the content but I want the content to be saved in a variable. How do I do that? I tried $content=readfile("file.txt") but that doesn't come out right.
I want to do like this:
$data=readfile("text.txt");
echo htmlentities($data);
That should give you an idea of how I want that to work.
That is what file_get_contents is for:
$data = file_get_contents("text.txt");
echo htmlentities($data);
If you must use readfile you can use output buffering to get the contents into a variable:
ob_start();
readfile("text.txt");
$data = ob_get_clean();
echo htmlentities($data);
I don't see why you would avoid file_get_contents in this situation though.
file_get_contents so that anyone who comes across this knows that is what they should use. And for your knowledge, everything in PHP is written to a buffer by default called the output buffer. statements like echo "Test"; write to that buffer as well. That buffer is flushed to actual output depending on different settings. It could be flushed every 4KB of data, or not until the end of the script for example.ob_start just captures the output buffer, allowing you do extra processing to it if you want to or prevent it from outputting at all. It's useful if you want to call a function from some library and that function uses echo to output stuff, but you don't want it to output anything, or you want to process its output before outputting it.readfile() writes the contents of the file to a buffer. Use file_get_contents() instead.
readfileandfile_get_contentsare for doing two different things and what you want to do is exactly whatfile_get_contentsis for, not whatreadfileis for.