relative path in require()

[philippo]

I must be really stupid... After writing php for more than half a year I still don't know how php handles relative paths.

e.g.:
my page is located in a subdirectory: /aboutme/contact.php
on this page I include my common-file: require("../common/shared.inc.php");
in my /common/shared.inc.php I'm including another file: require("common/code.inc");

As my files are located in various directories and subdirectories, I'd like to use a relative path in shared.inc.php but it just seems to be possible to get a path from the calling page. What I want is a path that refers to the place where shared.inc.php actually is located.

(I don't want to use $DOCUMENT_ROOT - I'd rather use a real relative path!)

shouldn't be that hard, huh?

Thanx a lot
Philippo

[[deleted]]

Actually it's better not to use relative paths, and use something like $DOCUMENT_ROOT instead, because you'll run into tons of problems if you move your files, and generally it's difficult to remember where ../../../ points to.

Anyway, using "../" in an include works fine for me.

What is is not doing right?

[philippo]

one file is in a subdirectory /aboutme/contact.php another is in the root /index.php - on both I want to include the same file: /common/shared.inc.php

The problem is: in /common/shared.inc.php there is another file included. How should I manage this? The relative path is always from the view of the calling file (/aboutme/contact.php or /index.php) and like this it gets messed up. If I could get a path that is relative to the current document it would be great!

I can't use $DOCUMENT_ROOT as on some machines I use Apache and on another I use IIS (the haven't configured that variable!)

I hope this time you understand my question (remember last time?! my problem with those SQL-row-numbers, 🙂 )
Philippo

[[deleted]]

Ok, I did a little test and here's the problem:

include() parses the included file and makes it part of the current script.

That means that the current working path of the included script becomes the same as the calling script.

So if I have
docs/html/index.php
docs/html/a/a.php
docs/html/b/b.php

and I want to include a.php in index.php:
include("a/a.php");

And if I want to include b.php in a.php: include("../b/b.php");

now here's the kicker, if I call a.php from index.php, the CWD for a.php becomes / not a

so if a.php then tries to include b.php, it tries to go to ../b from /docs/html/
that means it looks for b.php in /docs/ (!)

So, don't use relative paths.
Instead, use a config file or a constant to define the "root" directory.