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.