Including a file in the root directory?

jredwilli

How do you include a file thats in the root directory (http://sitename.com/FILE HERE .html), in pages that are a in other sub directories, and not necessarily the same sub-dir. I basically want to include the header.html and foot.html files that are in my root dir, with pages I have made in sub-direcorties. And Its just a pain to have to figure out the Number of "../../../This needs to be". I just want to make an easier way to include files in a directory, mainly the root directory, and eventually in my include/ dir, but that is not needed at this time.

Im sure there must be an easy way to get the root dir and include a file within it.

I am thinking I can use basename(), or something like that somehow, but I am retarded so I don't quite understand how that function works exactly.

So basically how could I include the root dir header.html file into pages 1-3 sub-directories below the easiest way possible, so I don't have to worry about doing the "../../../" thing.

Thanks

benracer

why not just use the complete url? for example....

http://sitename.com/images/header.jpg

instead of...

../images/header.jpg

bradgrafelman

While benracer's got the right idea, you definitely don't want to use the web URL but rather the local filesystem path, like so:

$path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/file.html';

Also note that you shouldn't use [man]include/man on plain HTML files that don't contain PHP code you're expecting to be parsed; instead, use a function such as [man]readfile/man.

benracer

Thanks brad that will help me too, just out of interest what are the disadvantages of using the url?

bradgrafelman

Using a URL, the script must make an HTTP request. Not only can these be disabled (allow_url_fopen or whatever), but this uses more resources than is necessary, as the server must a) resolve the website domain, b) open a connect (albeit to itself) to port 80, and c) download the file across the HTTP connect. Depending upon how DNS is setup (and the bandwidth monitors), this could be counted against your bandwidth quota as it generates network traffic.

Using a local path, it simply reads the file from disk.

benracer

Thanks again!

jredwilli

Thanks a lot, I knew not to use the whole URL because of some reason, but I didn't really understand why. I just know I saw somewhere something about it not being a good idea to do that.

Thanks a bunch!
🙂

bradgrafelman

Don't forget to mark this thread resolved (if it is).

jredwilli

Ok, now using the readfile() function, what do I do exactly with that to get the header.html file to be parsed. I have my .htaccess file set up so php can be written in html files, so I thought just doing this would work,

echo $path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/header.html';

but it just shows

/the path/to/my root/directory on/ the server/header.html

How do I read the contents of header.html?

NogDog

readfile($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/header.html');

bradgrafelman

jredwilli wrote:
I have my .htaccess file set up so php can be written in html files

So wait, is there PHP code to be processed in the header/footer files? If so, you'll want to use [man]include[/man] instead; I simply suggested [man]readfile/man since the files had a .html extension (why not rename them to .php if they have PHP code to parse, that way the PHP parser doesn't have to waste time looking at every .html file on your server?).

jredwilli

Well this is what I have in my .htaccess file that makes the php in html pages parse:

RewriteEngine  off
AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html

I don't really know why I don't just switch the header and footer types from .html to .php, I guess it was just what I saved them as. Would the best and easiest thing in my case be to use this idea and just rename them to .php files?

NogDog

If you [man]include/man or [man]require/man a file, it does not care what the suffix is; it still processes it as a PHP file. The .htaccess setting only affects files accessed through the webserver via HTTP requests.