What are best practices for manipulating and modifying included external files in PHP?

When including external files in PHP, it's important to follow best practices to manipulate and modify them effectively. One common approach is to use functions like file_get_contents() to read the contents of the file into a variable, make the necessary modifications, and then write the updated contents back to the file using functions like file_put_contents(). 

// Read the contents of the external file into a variable
$filename = 'external_file.php';
$contents = file_get_contents($filename);

// Make modifications to the contents as needed
$modifiedContents = str_replace('old_value', 'new_value', $contents);

// Write the modified contents back to the external file
file_put_contents($filename, $modifiedContents);

Keywords

file handling include require file_get_contents file_put_contents

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