Section 11.6.  Reading Buffers

11.6. Reading Buffers

Output buffers are two-way affairs, which means you can read from them as well as write to them. So far we have only covered writing data; reading that data back is done by using the ob_get_contents( ) function.

The ob_get_contents( ) function takes no parameters and returns the full contents of the most recently opened buffer. For example:

    $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM EmployeeTable WHERE ID = 55;");

    while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
            extract($row);
            print "Some info A: $SomeInfoA\n";
            print "Some info B: $SomeInfoB\n";
            print "Some info C: $SomeInfoC\n";
            // ...[snip]...
            print "Some info Z: $SomeInfoZ\n";
    }

That script sends its data (presumably lots of employee data) to the screen. With output buffering, we can change it to save to a file, like this:

    ob_start( )
    $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM EmployeeTable WHERE ID = 55;");

    while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
            extract($row);
            print "Some info A: $SomeInfoA\n";
            print "Some info B: $SomeInfoB\n";
            print "Some info C: $SomeInfoC\n";
            //...[snip]...
            print "Some info Z: $SomeInfoZ\n";
    }

    $output = ob_get_contents( );
    ob_end_clean( );
    file_put_contents("employee.txt", $output);

That scripts treats output like a scratch pad, saving it to a file rather than sending it to output.