How to get Wordpress Widget(sidebar) without printing it?

Question

I am using Wordpress and PHP. I declared a custom sidebar using this code :

   function customtheme_widgets_init() {
register_sidebar( array(
  'name'          => esc_html__( 'My custom sidebar', 'customtheme' ),
  'id'            => 'my-custom-sidebar',
  'description'   => esc_html__( '.', 'customtheme' ),
  'before_widget' => '',
  'after_widget'  => '',
  'before_title'  => '',
  'after_title'   => '',
) );
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'customtheme_widgets_init' );

Ok so In my code I want to get my sidebar and store it in a PHP variable $the_widget . Using this code :

if ( is_active_sidebar( 'my-custom-sidebar' ) ) :
    $the_widget = dynamic_sidebar('my-custom-sidebar');
endif;

when i do that it automatically echoes the widget(sidebar) when i call dynamic_sidebar() can i do that without the echo?? is there another function in the wordpress codex that can do the same?

Answer 1

No unfortunately there isn't a WordPress function such as get_dynamic_sidebar() however a common method for getting the sidebar into a variable as a string is this:

if ( is_active_sidebar( 'my-custom-sidebar' ) ) :
    ob_start();
    dynamic_sidebar('my-custom-sidebar');
    $the_widget = ob_get_contents();  //or ob_get_clean();
    ob_end_clean();
endif;