the_widget() inside functions.php

Question

I'm setting some options in the backend using functions.php and I'm doing:

$w = the_widget('My_Custom_Widget');

but I don't get any output.

However doing

<?php the_widget('My_Custom_Widget'); ?>

on any page template works fine.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

The function the_widget() does not return any output it only echos it. If you want to save its output to a variable you need to use output buffering.

ob_start();
the_widget('My_Custom_Widget');
$w = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();