Get the rendered PHP blade template content – Laravel 5

There was a scenario I recently encountered, whereby it was especially useful to retrieve the rendered contents of the PHP blade template in Laravel 5, before simply returning it to the browser. I wanted access to the HTML view as a string, that I could further manipulate myself, before returning it to the browser.

Let’s jump right in and say that our PHP blade template in Laravel lives at resources/views/sample.blade.php, and this is what the contents are made up of:

<div>
  <p>This is {{$name}}.</p>
</div>

We’ve got a simple route in app/Http/routes.php, which calls a method from our controller:

Route::get('/whoami', 'SampleController@getName');

And within our controller (app/Http/Controllers/SampleController.php), we call the all important render method on the returned view:

<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;

class SampleController extends Controller
{
  public function getName()
  {
    $contents = view('sample', ['name' => 'Code Chewing'])->render();
    // do some other manipulation?
    return $contents;
  }
}

The render method comes from the View class in vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/View/View.php.

You now have an opportunity to access the populated template, in string form, before handing it off to the browser.