Can you read a parsing PHP page's results

Is there anyway at all of reading the results of a parsing PHP page from within that same PHP page itself. In other words can you read the HTML code it's going to create. I know that you can use regular expressions to parse the HTML page manually swapping variable content as you would with most any template system... I guess I am asking if you can get the results of an echo statement. If I had to write it in pseudo code it would be this: $htmlCode = echo $myPHPcontent; I find it highly unlikely but I thought I'd toss it out to those who know. TIA, ck PS: I am a newbie who genuinely for the past hour has searched the archives, the manual and tried writing several scripts to make this work with no success. Forgive me if I missed something obvious.