[RESOLVED] Why? Parsing differences using include() relative path

sherry

Hello.

I am curious to find out the following:

I have tried

include 'dir/file1.php';

and

include('dir/file1.php');

The parsing results are not as expected UNTIL I use

include('http://domain...com/dir/file1.php');

Why might that be?

Thanks.

bradgrafelman

Well there is no difference at all between the first two, but for the third you're doing something entirely different.

For the first, you're telling PHP to read in the contents of a local file and execute them. For the third, you're telling PHP to make an HTTP request to a remote webserver, download the contents of that web page, and then execute those contents as PHP.

sherry

Thanks for your reply, bradgrafelman.

Q: Since the code is the same for all, though, how come the output is different between the relative path and the URL version? It's the same code that traverses line-by-line and ultimately gets executed regardless of its route I thought.

Also, how to know which version to use and when?

Thanks.

Derokorian

An http request is different than reading the file itself. An http request the file gets parsed by the PHP engine and then that output is read, as opposed to the code producing the output.

bradgrafelman

sherry wrote:
Since the code is the same for all

Uh.. no, it definitely is not. It's about as different as night and day.

sherry wrote:
how come the output is different between the relative path and the URL version

It's not that you're using a relative path (vs. absolute), it's that you're comparing a local file path to a URL - the two concepts have no correlation between them at all.

You're essentially asking why viewing the output of a PHP script through a web browser is different than simply opening the PHP script directly.

sherry wrote:
It's the same code that traverses line-by-line and ultimately gets executed regardless of its route I thought.

I don't know what you're referring to here, but hopefully by now I've illustrated why including a file locally is worlds apart from including that same file via an HTTP request.

sherry wrote:
Also, how to know which version to use and when?

Er... do you want to get the rendered output of a PHP script as it would be sent to a web browser, or do you want to include a local file (e.g. a .php script) instead? If you can answer that question (which I sure hope you can), then it should be obvious which "version" to use.

sherry

Thanks for your replies, folks.

I have normally used and read code that use include() to read in html, text, etc. but I seem to have run across on the 'Net somewhere where it appeared that the file called with a relative path was also parsed when the include() statement was used. It seemed strange so I began to question its use.

Thanks for the info.

sherry

Clarification:

I think I better recollect the example I was trying to describe. It was referring to parsing of 2 files where the 'calling' file used a relative path in the include(). The 'called' file also used relative paths via include(). These 2 files were in different directories therefore, each was relative to its own directory.

The problem was the calling file parsed correctly to a point and the other didn't because they were not referencing the same starting point of relativity (if that makes sense). It worked fine and parsed correctly when the calling file used the absolute path in the include(). The replies in this thread helped to figure that out. Thanks.

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