Using header() in a relative way for counter program

[jsoares]

I am trying to write a simple counter program.

What I want to be able to do is know is where a unique visitor comes from, how he navigates through a particular website, and where he goes when he leaves the website.

I was thinking of using header(Location: http address), but I don't want to use it in an absolute way. Isn't there some dynamic or relative way to use this?

Is there some variable I can put in that will simply retrieve whatever http address the user is on so I can log in to database or to a log file?

I want to be able to do something like this:

$htmlpage = header("Location: relative http address");

To have to write out an associate array for hundreds of web pages on one website seems to be a "brute force" way of doing it.

Thanks for any hints. I looked in the PHP function reference, but it's a bit spare on details.

John Soares
mailto:[e-mail]

[Rohan_Hill]

All header(Location🙂 does is redirect a user to the page you specify, it doesn't return any of the info you want.

To get the page the user has come from, use $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'].
As for detecting which page the user is on, you could do this by having each page pass its url to the script via a query string.
And I don't know of any way to detect where a user goes after they leave a site, I doubt there is one.

[jsoares]

Hi Rohan:

Thanks for answering. I can see how to use http referer to capture where a user came from. Will this happen when they access the page I'm counting?

Let's say I have a web page called http://www.mypage.com. I want to count accesses to all pages within this website. How do I make my count program access "mypage"? Do I have to "hard-code" it in? Also, say "mypage" has over 100 pages. I'd hate to have to make an associative array with all these pages in it, like:

mypage/contact.html
mypage/guarantee.html
mypage/tutorial.html

etc. Then I'd have to go through the array each time, comparing where the user was to the array entries, incrementing by one if the entry is found. This seems a "brute-force" way to do things.

Is there a better way to do this? I tried using "http://www.mypage.com/" thinking the last "/" would pick up all pages in the web site that were clicked on, but it just picked up the main page!

Also, I was told that there is a difference between counting the links the user clicks on vs. what page the user is on. For a simple page, where all links go somewhere inside the website, this doesn't seem to make sense.

Thanks for any hints.

Best,

John Soares
mailto:[e-mail]

[dawson1323]

why don't you write one page and call it "anything.inc" and then add one line at the top of every page that includes "anything.inc".

does that make sense?

-D

[Rohan_Hill]

The way I'd do it is make all the pages on your site .shtml files, so they can have Server Side Includes. Then somewhere on each page, enter <!--#include virtual="counter_script_file.php" -->
That would make the file counter_script_file.php run from every page of your site every time it's loaded. Is that what you're after?

And also, I don't think there is a way to count the links a user clicks on, why don't you want to just count what page they're on?