Dynamic PHP to Static HTML Conversion

[tereglow]

I am working on an application that has dynamic PHP pages running expensive queries in Oracle.  I'd rather have these queries execute via cron than dynamically, each time the page is loaded as the data does not have to be "to the second" up to date.

 

Via shell scripting, I can do something like "php test.php > test.html" and automate that, but am looking for a more robust solution within PHP.  I've read through http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/29/0.php which is exactly what I need, however, when I run something similar, the PHP code itself just gets put into an HTML file, not actually converted.

 

My understand was that fread would actually execute the PHP file and output the results, but that does not seem to be the case.  Is there a function within PHP to actually execute a PHP script and output the results, rather than just read it?

 

I appreciate any assistance,

Tom