Using theme functions in custom module

This is a pretty specific issue which may not have an elegant answer. I want to share a menu across two sites one Drupal and one not. I'm using a custom module to implement hook_menu_link_alter and want to output a themed menu to a file. There's no discussion on this point, we need to just expose an html file for the other site. I know a brute force way to do this by just looping through and just re-creating what the theming function already does, but I thought maybe there was a way to actually use the theming function directly.

Right now I'm trying...

theme('links', theme('navigation-links', 'menu-name'), array('id' => 'menu-id'));

but am receiving no output. I'm also receiving no errors, which is a bummer. (Note: I'm not 100% that the theming function for navigation-links is actually theme('navigation-links'')).

Any ideas?

(Note: I alos posted this开发者_运维技巧 question over at the new Drupal StackExchange site but may remove it as the community isn't there yet)

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the theming function for links needs an array of links to theme.

you can use something like:

theme('links', menu_navigation_links('menu-name'));

The function menu_navigation_links() exists in includes/menu.inc and it uses the function menu_tree_page_data() which returns the menu's tree data according to the current page you're viewing.

You can use a similar function called menu_tree_all_data(), but you'll have to do the same manipulations that menu_navigation_links() does on the data it returns. otherwise, you'll still get empty menus.