Why doesn't this work?

pwebb0617

In File http://www2/allfunctions.php, I have:

<?
function display($variable)
{
Print $variable;
return(1);
}
?>

and then in file http://www2/main.php, I have:

<?
include("http://www2/allfunctions.php");
$result = display("Here I am!");
If (result == 1)
{
Print "Display successful";
}
else
{
Print "Display unsuccessful";
}
?>

and the output? When I connect to http://www2/main.php I get:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: display() in /html/main3.php on line 3

This might be simple, but what am I doing wrong? It was my understanding that anytime you put an "include" statement with a valid filename as the argument it became part of the code of your existing page and could then be referenced as such.

If include statements aren't what I need to be using, what should I be using? I've already tried Require() with no luck.

Thanks in advance!,
-Paul

devinemke

In order to use URL's with include() you must have "URL fopen wrappers" enabled in your php.ini file.

pwebb0617

Thanks for the response. Within my /usr/local/lib/php.ini file, I see that

allow_url_fopen = On

(In other scripts my include statements reference URLS without a problem as well)

Thanks!
-Paul

tomhath

and the output? When I connect to http://www2/main.php I get:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: display() in /html/main3.php on line 3

Might just be a typo, but why does it report main3 when you said you connected to main? Where did the 3 come from?

Also, this line is missing the $ in front of result:

If (result == 1)

pwebb0617

You are indeed correct. Both were typos on my part. The main3.php return is from something I discovered -- In typing this out for everyone, I realized when I went to save main.php that I already had not one, but two main.php's --- Main.php and main2.php. So I saved the third one as main3.php. Then when I cut and pasted the output, I forgot to correct my narrative.

The other typo (not putting a $ in front of my variable name) could have caused problems in other cases, so I corrected it. The output didn't change, though...

So I'm slightly confused because in a few different cases code that exists in files I include with the INCLUDE statement do not work on the originating PHP script. This happens on two different servers running different versions of PHP (PHP v4.1.1 on this server and PHP v4.2.3 on the other one) -- Any simple explanations?

At the moment I'm having to repeat my code in files to make this stuff work, and when I revise the code for one I have to go through and revise it for all of them.

Thanks for your response!
-Paul

pwebb0617

Well, Oddly it does have something to do with the URL reference. Originally I was fully qualifying URLs to get around the "file not found in the include statement of php.ini" problem -- I would fully qualify the path of the file, and everything would work fine. When I tried the following in main3.php:

include "allfunctions.php";

as opposed to:

include "http://www2/allfunctions.php";

everything worked fine, and I got the output:

Here I am!Display successful

So, take that for what you will. It seems that I can't win no matter what I do -- If I don't fully qualify the path of the php file to be included, I run the risk of my users getting the "Not in INCLUDE path" error. If I do qualify the path, I run the risk of my file not being included and everything blows up. And, if I add the path of my html directory to my php.ini file, every time I add a new html directory (for another site) I have to remember the added step of putting the html line in the include path.

Am I missing something? I like PHP, but it seems that with the later versions it's becoming increasingly difficult to follow the logic of the creators.

Thanks for all your help everyone!
-Paul

Weedpacket

Is allfunctions.php on another server? There is a warning in the manual that include("http://remote file") won't work on Windows machines prior to PHP4.3.

If it's just another file on the same server (is "www2" for real or just an abbreviation for forum-posting purposes?), then you don't need to be using an HTTP URL at all, just specifying the location of the file in the filesystem. It's important to keep in mind the difference between URLs and filenames.