What's the best way to code for includes >

Saz

Getting a bit stuck on this and please remember I'm fairly new to PHP coding ;-) What's the best code for coding an include please ? The actual full code that you would put into the page that you wanted to put the included content into.

Also, how would you do it if the content that you wanted included was on the same website and how would you do the code if the content was from another website please ?

Any help appreciated.

Saz.

JamieThompson

Dont take this as truth mind. Im late, there's bound to be a few typos.

Theres the require, include, require-once and include once functions. I would explain myself, but its probly best for you to look at the referances.
Its pretty simple just basic statments nothing fancy. You may want to look at relative paths and soforth but its nothing taxing.
If youve got a file on your system, to go down a directory use ../ or current directory is ./

If i was in root which holds the index.php I can use include('./include.php');
or if i wanted to include include1.php I could use include('./FOLDER/include1.php');
So basically ./ is saying from the curent directory then telling it to either go deeper or from the current direcory.

If you were working on index1.php.
You could use ./include1.php as it is in the same directory, but to include include.php you would have to drop out of the folder directory.
You do this by doing: ../include.php
You can keep on dropping down a directory asmany times as you want untill you get to your PUB or ROOT directory.

So say I was in 5 directorys deep and i had multiple folders in each directory.
Using a combination of ../ and ./ I can select any file from any location.

However.
This is only true if the file is on the same server. If you are including a file from a remote location you have to use a full http:// address.
This is explaned in the referances.

http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.require.php
http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.include.php
http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.require-once.php
http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.include-once.php

NogDog

Include/require only needs to be used if you expect the included file to contain PHP code within <?php . . . ?> tags that you want to be processed as if it were code at that point within the calling script. Otherwise, you are better off using [man]readfile/man, or possibly [man]file_get_contents/man if you want to save the output of that file to a variable instead of immediately outputting it. For this reason, you normally do not include files from another web site, as you normally are not getting PHP source code when you do that, plus it adds another potential security hole in your application should the file on that remote site become compromised. In such cases you'll probably want to use readfile() or file_get_contents().

Saz

Many, many thanks Jamie and Charles, for the detailed information on this - it's been fairly heavy reading for a novice to this like me, but I've worked through it and at least understand a lot more about it, with the problem solved as well.

Much appreciated.

Is it just me, or does anyone else here, just luuuuurve this PHP stuff 🙂 It's just so powerful and seems as though there's no end to it's usefulness.

Saz.

JamieThompson

Glad I could be of assistantce. Bout time I contributed around here!