Write To The Output Buffer In PHP

10th February 2009 - 3 minutes read time

The first thing you learn about in PHP is probably how to print something. This is usually done with a call to the echo or print, but there is another way to print things by writing content directly to the output buffer. The following code looks like you are writing to a file, but the text will appear in the browser window because we are writing to the php://output output stream.

$fp = fopen("php://output", 'r+');
fputs($fp, "Hello World");

Or another way...

file_put_contents("php://output", "Hello World");

The php://output stream is an encapsulation between PHP and the browser. The stream doesn't really exist, but PHP knows what to do with it.

Why would you ever need to know this? Well lets say that you had an application that produced some logs when users performed certain actions. You might want to print those to screen in your development environment rather than save them. So rather than altering the code to see what environment you are in you can just set a configuration option so that you write to php://output instead of the log file. This means that your logs will appear with your output.

PHP

Comments

thanks for the code, very useful for me.

Submitted by Super 7 Lotto on Tue, 02/17/2009 - 17:33

Permalink

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
9 + 6 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Related Content

Recreating Spotify Wrapped In PHP

17th March 2024

I quite like the end of the year report from Spotify that they call "Wrapped". This is a little application in which they tell you what your favorite artist was and what sort of genres you listened to the most during the year.

Read more

Should A Constructor Throw An Exception?

18th February 2024

Let's say you had a class that you wanted to use, but there was some sort of error in creating the object. This might be that the wrong parameters were passed, or the third party service (eg. a database) wasn't available at the time of creation.

Read more

PHP Question: Variable Reference

10th December 2023

Question

What does the following code print out?

function arrayPrint($array)
{
   echo implode(' ', $array);
}

$arrayA = [1, 2, 3];
$arrayB = $arrayA;
$arrayB[1] = 0;
arrayPrint($arrayA);

Read more

Creating An Authentication System With PHP and MariaDB

15th October 2023

Using frameworks to handle the authentication of your PHP application is perfectly fine to do, and normally encouraged. They abstract away all of the complexity of managing users and sessions that need to work in order to allow your application to function.

Read more

Creating Sparklines In PHP

17th September 2023

A sparkline is a very small line graph that is intended to convey some simple information, usually in terms of a numeric value over time. They tend to lack axes or other labels and are added to information readouts in order to expand on numbers in order to give them more context.

Read more