note 23936 added to function.dirname

If you want relative includes like C or C++ has, you need to find out where you are in relation to the base path of the server. That is, if you are two levels into the "htdocs" directory in apache, then you need to add "../../" to the begining of the include to get back to the base directory. That's simple. What's NOT so simple is when you have "nested" included files. Continuing the example above, if you have a file example.php and it includes "../../lib.php" and lib.php includes "lib2.php" guess where "lib2.php" needs to be located? In the same directory as example.php! What you really wanted was to have lib.php and lib2.php in the same directory... To get that result you need to include "../../lib2.php" in lib.php... But wait, now it won't work if the original example.php file is in any other place but two levels deep! The answer to the problem is this: find the number of levels you are currently into the base directory and add as many "../" as you need to the begining of the include filename in EVERY include file. Here's an example: example.php ------------ $BasePath = str_repeat("../", substr_count(dirname($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"]), "/")); require_once($BasePath."lib.php"); ------------ Notice that we're adding the $BasePath and the name of the file we want together to get the full path. It will look like this: "../../lib.php" lib.php ------ require_once($BasePath."lib2.php"); ------ Notice here that BasePath has already been defined so we don't know or care what BasePath looks like, only that it now allows us to use a relative path to lib2.php since it automatically adds the number of "../" needed to get to it from the original example.php that the server executed. The path here will look like this: "../../lib2.php" And now we can easily have lib.php and lib2.php in the same directory, and have lib.php include lib2.php as if it's a relative include. Pretty simple, no? :) -Fredric Echols -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.dirname.php http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+23936 http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+23936 http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+23936