Help with 'include' and paths....

[Anon]

Hello all!

I have a small PHP problem cocerning include & pathnames...

I've searched all over several message forums, but I haven't found an answer to my problem...

I want to use the include feature to "put together" the pages of my homepage... that means take a header and a footer htm file as well as another htm file dependent on user input.

That means I want to have a file called for example main.php and be able to call it with main.php?section=music to load the "music" page for example.. (I'd do a switch-case in main.php to load the proper htm file)

The problem are the path-names when doing the includes. My structure is as follows:

--root //header.htm, footer.htm, main.php...
|
+-- music // Subdir containing all the files used in this section..
| // most importantly: music.htm
|
+-- other section...

If I load the music.htm file from the main.php file, the links used in

music.htm are not valid as their path is relative to the subdir...

I tried using the chdir() functions in PHP, but it seems this only changes the working dir of the PHP-script.. the browser still looks in the wrong dir...

I have thought of several solutions for this problem, but none pleases me as they all involve either too much work or too many downsides.

1) Easiest solution: I could change the links in every htm file. It would take quite a lot of time, and I would not be able to view my htm files directly; only through a main.php call...

If I change everything to absolute pathnames, I wouldn't be able to view my homepage offline anymore.. (which would suck)

2) I could make a "dummy" php file in every directory just to include the main.php from there... I'd still have the whole system depedent on just the main.php (which is what I want), but this seems like a very "ugly" solution to me. 😉

I think there must another way of solving this in more or less clean way without rearranging the entire structure of my site...

Any suggestions??

Thanks in advance

Lorenz

[sfullman]

OK Lorenz, that was a LONG email so this is just a summary about include files:

1. Calling an include using an relative path.

The current file is located in:
www.yoursite.com/granddaddy/dad/file.php

Here are some examples of how the code should look:

if the file is in the same folder:
include("include.php");

if the include is in /granddaddy/include.php:
include("../include.php");

if the include is in /granddaddy/uncle/include.php:
include("../uncle/include.php")

NOTE: if you use a relative path, you get the PHP CODE side of the page and all local variables in the parent script are available.

2. Using absolute (URL) paths:

You can do this:
include("http://yoursite.com/granddaddy/dad/include.php");

but the results will be differnent. You will just get the OUTPUT, not the php coding using the variables that are in the parent script. However, you can pass variables in a query string such as:

include("http://yoursite.com/file.php?value=1&othervalue=2");

but your output will only have those two parameters to work with.

3. Passing an absolute path (file location on server):

you can also do this:
include("f:\hosts\user\www\granddaddy\dad\include.php");

but you CANNOT add a query string (and don't need to since the file will have all local variables available.

If you would like a script that will turn a page and it's variables into a variable for an HTML email, let me know and I'll give you a hand at [e-mail].

HTH

[crimaniak]

Here is mistake in include implementation so portable way is only

include dirname(FILE).'/relative/path/from/current/file';

[Anon]

It seems you didn't understand my question properly...

Example:

In /html_dir/subdir/file.htm :

...
<img src="logo.gif">
//this looks for '/html_dir/subdir/logo.gif'
//as it should...
...

In /html_dir/main.php :

include('./subdir/file.htm');

But as main.php is in the parent directory, the link sent to the browser by main.php will be
'/html_dir/logo.gif'

(basically applying src="logo.gif" from the dir where main.php resides)

See what my problem is??
It seems I'd have the change the dir the browser looks in (NOT the script)...

Cheers

Lorenz