function get_include_contents($filename) {

	    if (is_file($filename)) {
	        ob_start();
	        include $filename;
	        $contents = ob_get_contents();
	        ob_end_clean();
	        return $contents;
	    }
	    return false;
	}

I have edited my post to answer dave’s comment below.

By looking at this funciton you may think it’s just a substitute of file_get_contents().
The difference is that file_get_contents will return literaly the contents of the file, as opposed to get_include_contents that will actually run the code,
and because we are turning on output buffering, we can get the output of the script and store it in a string. For example if we have the php file ‘example.php’:

	echo 'The gamma laser toxic spill gave me powers';

file_get_contents will produce the following result:

	$string = file_get_contents('example.php');

	echo $string;
	// will output: echo 'The gamma laser toxic spill gave me powers';

If we use get_include_contents() instead, it will produce the following result:

	$string = get_include_contents('example.php');

	echo $string;
	// will output: The gamma laser toxic spill gave me powers

If you are still thinking why would I want to do this, I will give you a real life example to ilustrate:

Lets assume that you have the following email template in a file template.php:

echo  'Dear Mr. ' . $params['name'] . ',';
echo  'All your ' . $params['item'] . ' are belong to us!';

The function could then be extended to accept some paramaters that the template will need to have on scope:

	function get_include_contents($filename, $params) {

	    if (is_file($filename)) {
	        ob_start();
	        include $filename;
	        $contents = ob_get_contents();
	        ob_end_clean();
	        return $contents;
	    }
	    return false;
	}

After that we can send an email using template.php like this:

	$html_email = get_include_contents(
							   'example.php'
							   array(
								   'name'  =>; 'Satan',
							           'item'  => 'Snakes'
								  )
							);

	mail('someemail@blah.com', 'Subject', $html_email);	

The recipient of the email will have a message in his inbox saying:

Dear Mr. Satan,
All your snakes are belong to us!

pear config-set http_proxy http://username:password@proxyhost:port

    public static function slugify($text) {
		$text = trim($text);
		$text = str_replace(".", "", $text);
		$text = self::removeAccents($text);
		// replace non letter or digits by -
		$text = preg_replace('~[^\\pL\d]+~u', '-', $text);
		// trim
		$text = trim($text, '-');
		// lowercase
		$text = strtolower($text);
		// remove unwanted characters
		$text = preg_replace('~[^-\w]+~', '', $text);
		return $text;

	}

	public static function removeAccents($text) {
		$text = htmlentities(utf8_decode($text));
		$remove = array("&", "acute", "grave", "circ", "tilde", "uml");
		$text = str_replace($remove, "", $text);
		return $text;
	}

Put it inside an Utils class, and use it like

$slug = Utils::slugify("nothingisclear is awesome");

Anyway today i was into slugs and i surprisingly found a php simple-and-working static method for converting strings into slugs and i felt like sharing it:

/**
 * PHP "iconv" REQUIRED !!!
 * @param object $string
 * @param object $space [optional]
 * @return
 */

public static function convertStringIntoSlug($string,$space="-") {  

	if (function_exists('iconv')) {
        $string = @iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);
    }  

    $string = strtolower(preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9 -]/","", $string));
    $string = str_replace(" ", $space, $string);

    return $string;

}

here i’ve already wrote about a good jquery alternative (written by Leo Caseiro) for doing this