[RESOLVED] Reading the actual URL in PHP

WorldInChaos

Is there any way that I can get the entire URL of a site into PHP as a variable. I have no idea where to start as I have searched for hours for a solution to this.

Thanks for any suggestions you may have!

MarkR

Reading the full URL is a bit complicated as it's not all in one place, but for what you want, $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] is a good start (Requires host-header compatible clients, i.e. anything which isn't a hack-bot).

Mark

bradgrafelman

If you don't want to rely on HTTP headers that the client provides (which may have been tampered with or excluded entirely due to browser or proxy/gateway settings), you can reconstruct the URI like so:

$uri = 'http' . (isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) ? 's' : '') . '://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . ':' . $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

MarkR

However, the HTTP_HOST header is not optional (in HTTP 1.1) and most web servers require it to be right anyway to select the right virtual host.

Any gateway or proxy which strips the "Host:" header will stop 90% of web sites from working, so I don't think that's very likely.

So it's not a major dependency.

Moreover, the server may not have set SERVER_NAME to the same name that the client used.

So I argue that using HTTP_HOST is more likely to get the answer the OP wants.

Mark

WorldInChaos

Thank you all so much!
Both of those will work for what I need them to do. I think I will be using the more simple of the two, since it seems to be adequate.
If I have any more questions, I will be sure to ask them!
I really appreciate the quick responses and effective answers.

Thanks,
My World - is no longer in chaos.