title: How to assign the contents of a file to a variable in PHP
body: <p>I have a document file containing HTML markup. I want to assign the contents of the entire file to a PHP variable.</p>
  
  <p>I have this line of code:</p>
  
  <p><code>$body = include('email_template.php');</code></p>
  
  <p>When I do a <code>var_dump()</code> I get <code>string(1) "'"</code></p>
  
  <p>Is it possible to assign the contents of a file to a variable?</p>
  
  <p>[Note: the reason for doing this is that I want to separate the body segment of a mail message from the mailer script -- sort of like a template so the user just modifies the HTML markup and does not need to be concerned with my mailer script. So I am including the file as the entire body segment on <code>mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers, $return_path);</code></p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>