include silently fails

b4audoin_p

I'm flummoxed. I have a bit of code that has always worked even as I moved it between architectures but now it fails and won't tell me why:

The purpose here is to simply to redisplay the edit form after modification so as to confirm mod is made. So INCLUDE the edit script with the original params

The are the relevant lines:

$incstring= 'http://localhost/elect/elec_edit.php?db='.$searchdb.'&idx='.$searchidx;
echo $incstring;
include $incstring;
echo 'included';

On the output I get the 1st two echos as expected then nothing. No errors or anything other that the scrip seems to end. at the top of this script I have:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);

If I cut and paste the resulting constructed url into another nrowser window, it reacts as expected.

Additional:

This is a new Linux implementation with apache, php and mysql all newly installed. I allow all that I can find in this area (allow url_fopen) in php and include in apache but can't find any other config params that might make a difference. I suspect it is configuration but can't understand why I get no errors or anything from php. Any pointers most grateful for.

Many thanks

Paul

b4audoin_p

Sorry ... I have to add one correction. The output I get is the echo of the $incstring and no more. Sorry for confusion

johanafm

Why on earth are you including things on localhost (the same machine your script is running on) via the webserver? There is a common way of accessing local storage called the file system, i.e. something along the lines of

include '/data/www/scriptfile.php';

This is used when you actually want to execute the included script somewhere in the currently running script. Do note that this is the exact same thing (almost) as copy-pasting the included script into the place of the include statement. Consider two script files, included.php and main.php
included.php

echo 5;
$var = 'a';
return 0;

main.php

$var = null;
$retval = include 'included.php';
echo $var;

This turns the executed script into

#start of main.php
$var = null;
# included script - more or less copy pasted (change to the return statement)
echo 5;
$var = 'a';

# and the return value
$retval = 0;

# rest of main.php
echo $var;

Or, if it's just a matter of displaying that particular web page, which it seems to be, tell the browser to fetch it instead

header('location: http://example.com/script.php?stuff=values');

And if your script doesn't execute properly and gives no error messages, fix your error reporting settings in php.ini.

Weedpacket

Just checking: allow_url_include is also on?

(Incidentally, is it really [font=monospace]localhost[/font] or is that standing in for something like [font=monospace]www.example.com[/font]? I ask because if it's the former then it seems like an odd thing to be doing.)

b4audoin_p

Gents

Thanks for the quick responses. Yes - allow_url_include is enabled in php.ini

This is as set in php.ini

error_reporting
; Default Value: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE

And I assume the explicit directive in the script overrides this anyway?

I don't understand this syntax:

header('location: http://example.com/script.php?stuff=values');

Though having looked it up in the book seems realistic. All sites I have seen so far suggest either include or require as the standard mechanism for calling a php scrip from a php script (which is which is what I am trying to do) I tried a few variations but can't seem to get the variables to work properly using the header syntax. This is a simple , private website and simplicity takes precedence over efficiency.

I don't fully grasp why localhost will not give the right result. Is this not translated at the server and thus redirected back to itself? In any case, replacing this with the address of the server gives the same result.

So the original question still stands: I don't see any reason why the include should fail and even more, why it is failing silently.

Grateful for any pointers

Regards

b4audoin_p

Gents,
Ok .... take that back. After a bit of fiddling I got the header to work as you said it would .... Thank you! Interestingly while it didn't work, PHP was throwing the expected errors ... and still the include did not. At this point a mystery I can live with. Thanks again for the education.

Regards

NogDog

If you include() a URL, I suspect that include() itself probably won't fail as long as something was returned from the web server it called. (In other words, include() might have worked just fine even if the web resource it called did not perform nominally.) If you really need to access something from a URL, I'd recommend using cURL, which will allow you to check HTTP response codes and such.

b4audoin_p

NogDog,
Yes - checked for that in earlier versions by echoing the lone just before execution then pasting it to a new browser... worked. cURL? Reall? thought that was more for downloads. This is a very simple php scrip calling another php script with a couple of variables. I still can't understand why it got so dofficult and in fact, thanks to another poster, have now bypassed, but never resolved the original problem(s).
Thanks to all

b4audoin_p

johanafm

b4audoin_p;11010499 wrote:
cURL? Reall? thought that was more for downloads.

Which is what you are doing. You are calling the webserver (on the same machine as the currently running script) and downloading it, to the very same machine. Yes, the script does get executed, and then return the contents, but it is done via the web server. If you use curl, you can set timeout options, check HTTP status code, headers and whatever else you might want, as well as create post requests etc.

b4audoin_p;11010499 wrote:
This is a very simple php scrip calling another php script with a couple of variables.

Which is why I suggest using a header redirect so that the browser requests the file directly instead since you don't seem to want to do anything else than run that entire script and echo it contents to the browser, which is exactly what happens when the browser is redirected to that location.

Otherwise, you include/require a script using the file system. That is, instead of including http://localhost/pathfromwebroot/file, you include /pathtowebroot/pathfromwebroot/file, which will not use the web server. While you can't include a query string while including script files from the file system, all variables that are available in the including script will also be available in the included script.

b4audoin_p

johanafm

Again , thanks for the workaround p- clearly a better mechanism. I am , as you have probably guessed, a bit new at this and the only reason I used the include was that if you look up 'calling a php script from a php script' that is the overwhelming answer. Not to worry now - problem solved. On to the next one.
Best Regards