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PHP Enhancing a Simple PHP Application Cleaning URLs with Subfolders Server Paths and Constants

Martina Carrington
Martina Carrington
15,754 Points
Posted by Martina Carrington
Martina Carrington
15,754 Points

some reason i can't pass Task 2/3 stage 2 cleaning URLS with subfolders <?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."../../

i have try <?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."../../config/company.php"); ?>

<html> <head> <title>Leadership | Shirts 4 Mike</title> </head> <body>

<h1>Leadership</h1> <p><strong>Owner:</strong> ????</p> <p><a href="/contact/">Contact</a></p>

</body> </html> and i can't getting error's

about/leadership/index.php 
<?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."../../config/company.php"); ?>

<html>
<head>
 <title>Leadership | Shirts 4 Mike</title>
</head>
<body>

<h1>Leadership</h1>
<p><strong>Owner:</strong> ????</p>
<p><a href="/contact/">Contact</a></p>

</body>
</html>

3 Answers

Thiago van Dieten
Thiago van Dieten
16,639 Points
Thiago van Dieten
Thiago van Dieten
16,639 Points

Honestly, what I think you are doing is correct, that would be the way to include that file relatively.

To debug what you are doing anyway, I did a var_dump on $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] and that returned an empty string, so we have no use for that. So then you are left with:

include("../../config/company.php")

Which will fail, saying: PHP Warning: include(../../config/company.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in about/leadership/index.php on line 3 PHP Warning: include(): Failed opening '../../config/company.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php') in about/leadership/index.php on line 3

When you try to include that file like this however

include('config/company.php');

Treehouse will say you're correct and lets you progress. Which is weird, because the full path would be htdocs/about/leadership/config/company.php . So yeah, beats me!

Jayden Spring
Jayden Spring
8,625 Points
Jayden Spring
Jayden Spring
8,625 Points

DOCUMENT_ROOT outputs the doc routes absolute path of the current working directory which the script is being executed in.

Therefore you are appending a string to an absolute path which if you printed the path you are trying to form to the screen it would be something like; /var/www/html/../../company/config.php

That path would cause an error - it's in accessible. If you are trying to access something in the current path you can use either for your scenario:

  • include('myscript.inc') - would look in current directory
    • include('./myscript.inc') - ./ denotes in current directory
    • include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"{ . "Myscript.inc")
Thiago van Dieten
Thiago van Dieten
16,639 Points
Thiago van Dieten
Thiago van Dieten
16,639 Points

No problem, don't forget to pick the answer that helped you. ;)