I trying to show the rendered output thrown by a PHP file as text.
The text should contain the HTML tags as well.
Something like what you'd get when you do a "View Source" on a web page.
How can I achieve this?
Output rendered HTML as plain text
20.4k Views Asked by maxxon15 At
5
There are 5 best solutions below
1
On
try using php's show_source(); function.
give it a link to your text file e.g.
show_source("/link/to/my_file.html");
and be careful with it because it can expose passwords and other sensitive information
1
On
There are multiple ways of doing this, the easiest one being to use pre tags, or you could rename your file from .php to .phps, or use highlight_file($file) which also syntax-highlight your code. There's also file_get_contents() and even show_source() as @hackitect mentioned.
Remember though, any html-code has to be outputted within pre tags and escaped.
2
On
To do this, the easiest way is to capture everything which is sent to the output and buffer it. At the end you can decide whether you want to render it just like you always do, or whether you want to use htmlspecialchars() to display the source.
At the start of your code, place the following statement:
$outputType = 'viewsource';
ob_start();
At the end of your code, add the following:
$output = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
if($outputType == 'viewsource') {
echo htmlspecialchars($output);
} else {
echo $output;
}
0
On
Another trick which I actually used to do this was make a hyperlink with the view-source url in it.
Works perfectly on Chrome, Firefox and Opera but not on IE.
<a target="_blank" href="view-source:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27034642/output-rendered-html-as-plain-text">Get Plain Text</a>
Since you have mentioned that you want the output to be like viewing the source, you can simply declare the content type as plain text at the beginning of your script.
This will render the output as text, and the text file is downloadable.
Ex:
Hope this will make sense, or else if you want to display this to the user, an alternative way would be to pass the output through htmlspecialchars(); function.
Ex: