including a php command into another page without triggering it

Fife_Club

You can skip the first part four or so posts and go right to the part marked NEW DEVELOPMENT

This may be the wrong question but, without using the url is there any way to pass a variable on to another page? (but read more before you answer)

My question may not yield what I'm really looking for so here's the real situation: I have a page which uses an include function to call a header and a footer file. All of these pages are php. I want to put something in my header file that will display $photo. BUT I want to asign the value of $photo in my regular page (not in the header). If I type this in my header file:

print "<img src=\"http://www.mysite.com/graphics/".$photo."\">\n;

then it will get parsed into regular html (<img src="http://www.mysite.com/graphics/">), losing the variable part before it gets included in my regular page (which is where I want the php script to actually work).

If this garbled mess makes sense to anybody, please tell me if this can be done easily without utilizing the url.

Thanks!

bastien

try

http://www.php.net/manual/sl/function.ob-start.php

but the issue i see is that the variable is passed to the file before it is set...buffering may not work

Fife_Club

Thanks for the link. It looks like it may help. But before I bury myself in learning this function, let me just rephrase my question in yet another way and then ask you if that is what the function you mentioned does.

I guess what I may be looking for is to print a print line. When my include file gets called it will execute and print the "inner" print line. Then when the main page executes it will then print the line I really intended (including the $photo). Is this somewhat the concept behind that function you linked works, (although it would obviously operate in a completely different manner, but with the same results)?

Thanks again
😕

jnuneznyc

It will work only if $photo variable is already set before the include line.

Main File:

<?php
    $photo = "banner1.gif";
    include("header.php");
?>

header.php

<? print("<img src=/images/$photo")?>

Fife_Club

That may be why my fiddling around didn't work. It's not the way I've set things up but if all I have to do is flip the order of some things then it's worth the effort (to do it on every page). Thanks. And if that doesn't work I'll give that buffer stuff a shot next.

😃

Fife_Club

NEW DEVELOPMENT

I tried the way of establishing the variable before calling the include and it worked! 🙂 I then adjusted all my pages and it didn't work anymore 🙁 What the *$#@!?

Here's what happened. Here's an example of my test pages that DID work:

Test Page

<?
$test = "this test works";
include("otherpage.php");
?>

Other Page

<?
print $test;
?>

But in my real world example I put in the full URL of the pages (because although all pages are on the same domain, not all pages are in the same folder):

Test Page

<?
$test = "this test works";
include("http://www.mysite.com/otherpage.php");
?>

And this one change of using the http://www... and stuff caused everything to fail. So what can I do to get around that. What other options do I have to tell it exactly where the file is located, but without using the full url? Any ideas?

bastien

just

<?
$test = "this test works";
include("../foldername/otherpage.php");
?>

Fife_Club

../ isn't working for me. Aside from not making the variable value pass to the included file, it won't even include the other file. I just get:

Warning: Failed opening '../header.php' for inclusion (include_path='') in ......

So far I know that including "header.php" will work. Using the full url will not create an error but the variable value will not carry thru to the included file. And Using ../ creates complete failure to even include the second page.

🙁 Any other ways?

philipolson

Think of it this way. You are including a page that is already processed by the web server and it's plain HTML. So it won't work. If that did work then we'd be able to include source code from google.com which for us would be nice but not for the fine people at google. But although I do not recommend doing the following at all, you could pass GET variables to the include like include 'http://a.com/b.php?a=b'; but that's silly, don't do that.

And look at your include_path directive, it's blank. So you must either include full paths to your includes, something like:

include '/full/path/to/this/include.php';

Or if you want to do relative includes, such as using ../ and whatnot, then you must have a . in the include_path. Is this your server, can you modify php.ini ? It'd be easiest if you could but if not... just use full paths.