URL addition and PHP?

Anon

I am finding it hard to describe what I want without knowing what I am doing and how I am doing it. So here is what I am doing: I am the webmaster for a student run newspaper, (http://student.plattsburgh.edu/cardinal.points/new_cp/index2.php) and I am trying to make my job a little easier. The news articles inside the boxes are actually an HTML file (or possibly a TXT file if I can figure some other things out). I wrote a short PHP code to open the file and read the first few lines (placing the first line in the header, the fourth line in the by-line, and the 5-15 as the body of the story). The link on the bottom of the box links to a JavaScript popup window that has the full story with a close button on the bottom.

What I want to do is to be able to have a php page that has an include statement where the file to include is after a ? in the URL. For instance if I had:
http://www.yourserver.com/thispage.php?secondfile.html the php page would include the 'secondfile.html'.

Also I want the link to the php file to add the filename that it needs to include after the ?. For instance:
Click here to read more... (<-- is a link) and the link is to a php file that has an include statement in it to include the html file of the news. The php file will also have the html for the close button.

Do you catch my drift? I hope someone can help! Thanks.

Anon

Yeah, sounds good, but be careful. When specifying a file to fopen via a querystring, you will need to run checks on your input.

Example.

http://www.yourserver.com/thispage.php?openpage=secondfile.html

Replace secondfile.html with /etc/passwd

and you might display the contents of the passwd file to the browser (bad).

Or Replace secondfile.html with ../../path/to/some/file

Then you might display the contents of a file that is below your document_root to the browser (bad)

The best way to do it, is to store page names in a db with each page name having a unique id.

ex. Table pages

| id | pageName |

| 5 | secondfile.html |

you url looks like this

http://www.yourserver.com/thispage.php?openpage=5

code:

$query = "select pageName from pages where id = $openpage";
$sth = mysql_query($query);

$page = mysql_result($sth,0);

include($page);

skyeflye

If I understand your problem, you just want to have a single file on your server that will open in the popup window, and you want to be able to tell that file which news story to "include" into itself.

If you had a file called: "top_story.html" that you wanted to open in the popup window, and you wanted that file to include a news story content file called "story3.html" then first, you could reference the "top_story.html" file like this:

top_story.html?story=story3.html

In your javascript function call, it would look like this:

javascript:openAWindow('news/top_story.html?story=story3.html','top_story',500,500,1)

Now, assuming that the two files were in the same directory (recommended for simplicity) you could put a PHP include statement like this within the <body> tag of "top_story.html"

<? include($story); ?>

This would include the file "story3.html" into the "top_story.html" file at the spot where you had the include statement. So, you see that be adding "?story=story3.html" to the page name, we are basically creating a variable called "$story" with a value of "story3.html". So you can do whatever you want to that variable... use and abuse it! 🙂

Now, if you want to include files into "top_story.html" that are in a different directory than top_story.html" (such as a directory called "news" sitting in the root of the web site) your include statement should probably look like this:

<? include($DOCUMENT.ROOT."news/$story"); ?>

If that doesn't work, then you should use this:

<? include($DOCUMENT.ROOT."/news/$story"); ?>

Note that those two are exactly the same except that the second one contains a slash in front of "news". Whichever one you use just depends on how Apache is configured, but it's no big deal. Generally, the 1st one will be more common, but neither is incorrect. the "$DOCUMENT_ROOT" variable is just a global PHP constant that equates to the root directory of your website from the SERVER root. On some servers it will have a slash at the end, and on others it may not.

I hope that helps! This is really one of the most powerful, easy concepts that you can put to use immediately. Good luck!

-THEO-

skyeflye

By the way,

"Calendar" (with an "e") is the correct spelling of the word, not "Calandar".

Look in your left navigation links.

Anon

Hey Theo, thanks. That is exactly what I wanted, and I am so happy that you could understand what I was doing. One thing, it gives me the error "Warning: Undefined variable: story in..." message. All that is in my openNews.php file is the include(&story); statement. Do i need anything that will get the variable from the address? (Like $HTTP_GET_VARS) ?? thanks again.