note 85855 added to function.include

Linking to CSS/JavaScript resources through an included file has bugged me for a long time because if I have a directory structure like: /www index.php /sub_dir index.php /includes header.php /style main.css where both index.php files include header.php and the header.php file includes something like: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style/main.css"> This will be included for /index.php but not for /sub_dir/index.php. I read through a few different ways to use relative includes but those are generally meant for the php include function not the HTML <link>. I didn't really love the idea of a new function that I would pass both the filename and a '../' string into which it could use in the href. I also didn't want to just use /style/main.css because in development it is not hosted in my root directory. Although I could change my configuration or my include_path I really just wanted to find a way for PHP to figure out the relative path for me. I finally found a solution that met my needs and here it is: <?php $include_dist = substr_count(dirname(__FILE__), DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR); $calling_dist = substr_count(dirname($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']), DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR); ?> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?=str_repeat('../', $calling_dist - $include_dist + 1)?>style/main.css"> In this case I added one to the difference to account for the fact that the include is one directory away from the base. This also means that str_repeat won't be passed a negative value, which would cause an error. dirname(__FILE__) gets the directory of the file being included while dirname($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']) gets the directory of the file including it. The script simply finds the difference in how far off the base directory the two are and prints the appropriate number of '../' before the URL. NOTE: dirname(__FILE__) can be replaced by __DIR__ in PHP greater than or equal to 5.3.0 ---- Server IP: 128.39.198.38 Probable Submitter: 76.90.126.27 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.include.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/85855 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/85855/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/85855/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/85855/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/85855/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/85855/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/85855/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/85855 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/85855 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php