Laravel: How to generate raw HTML string from Blade template

Introduction

Laravel Blade is a powerful templating engine provided with Laravel. In most cases, Blade is used to compile templates down to plain PHP code and display the resulting HTML through a response. However, there might be scenarios where developers need to capture that HTML output and use it elsewhere, for example in a cron job or generating a PDF. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to generate a raw HTML string from a Blade template in a Laravel application.

Getting Started

Before diving into generating raw HTML, ensure you have a Laravel application set up.

composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel-html-gen

Navigate to your new Laravel application directory.

cd laravel-html-gen

Basic Blade Template Rendering

To begin with, let’s examine a straightforward Blade template render process.

// Routes in web.php
Route::get('/welcome', function () {
    return view('welcome');
});

The above route returns the compiled HTML result of the ‘welcome’ Blade template directly to the user. But how can we capture this output as a string?

Rendering a View to a String

To convert a Blade template into a string you can use view()->render() method.

// Using view render in a route
Route::get('/capture', function () {
    $htmlContent = view('welcome')->render();
    return $htmlContent;
});

The render() method compiles the view file and returns its HTML content as a string, after this, you may use it as needed.

Rendering With Data

Blade templates often need to include dynamic data, so let’s see how we can pass data to a view and render it as HTML.

$users = User::all();
$htmlContent = view('users', ['users' => $users])->render();

This will populate the ‘users’ view with a collection of user models, thus enabling dynamic content rendering.

Advanced Blade Rendering

What happens if we want to conditionally render parts of a view or handle layouts? Blade’s templating engine provides an extensive variety of conditional statements and template inheritance features that are also available when rendering views to strings.

// Using sections and yield in Blade
@section('content')
<h1>User List</h1>
@foreach($users as $user)
    <p>{{ $user->name }}</p>
@endforeach
@endsection

Rendering Components

Laravel 7.x and above introduced the concept of Blade components that can help increase modularity by breaking the user interface into smaller, manageable parts. You can render components to strings similar to views.

$htmlContent = (string)Blade::component('components.user-card', ['user' => $user]);

Since components can be complex, this approach enables you to encapsulate specific functionality or layout aspects into reusable elements.

Handling Caching

Laravel caches the compiled Blade templates to optimize performance. When you’re generating HTML strings, especially during the development phase, you may need to ensure that the cache is clear to reflect the changes.

php artisan view:clear

By clearing the compiled views, Laravel will be forced to recompile them, picking up any changes that you make to your templates.

Using Output Buffering

In some scenarios, the Laravel way of rendering views may not be sufficient, in which case, PHP’s native output buffering functions can be used.

ob_start();
@include('welcome', $data);
$htmlContent = ob_get_clean();

This technique is handy if you need to modify the content before storing or displaying it.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have learned to convert Laravel Blade templates into raw HTML strings. This feature is especially useful when you need to manipulate or store the HTML output of a Blade view, instead of sending it directly as a response to a browser. Using these approaches, you can fully leverage Laravel Blade outside the typical request-response cycle.