PHP includes with sub folders... how?!

[Bollard]

Hey.

Im trying to change my site to use subfolders. At the moment i have all the pages, CSS and a header.php in the root. Now i have:

header.php

footer.php

index.php

css.css

products/page1.php

products/page2.php

products/page3.php

etc

The include works from index.php, but not from page1.php I understand that this is because from page2 its looking for the header.php in the products/ folder, but i dont know how to fix it. Ive tried

<?php include ('../header.php'); ?>

And that didnt work.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[primexx]

wait so you're accessing page2.php directly? or including that in index?

[Colin-uk Veteran]

is the header included in the product pages? (page1.php, page2.php, page3.php etc) ?

I assume the product pages are included in index.php and the problem your having is that it cant find the header file from the product page because its looking in the wrong place, is that right? :p

I think what you need to do is take the header includes out of your pages and just put use one include header statement at the top of index.php, that way you only have one statement and its looking in the right place for it.

[Sikh]

Try ./ because that looks for the root folder.

If I understand you correctly your going from

products / page#.php

to

header.php in root.

If thats the case, do ./header.php and it should go to the root folder and then find header and it should.

if your going from

root

to

products/page#.php

Then do include("products/page#.php")

This is all rough but it should work.

I hope I understood you right.

Cheers.

[marc2003]

assuming your webhost allows you to use .htaccess to set php settings, set an includes directory. for example here's mine.

php_value include_path ".:/users/m/marc2003/includes"

i now place any common php files inside this folder. now i can call on the file simply using

include 'header.php';

folder structure is now irrelevant as php will check in my includes folder first.

[rson451]

Try ./ because that looks for the root folder.

afaik, ./ is only a reference to the current working directory, it is not a link to your webroot. in this case, you may be correct, but if the script that was running is actually in mydomain.ext/some_folder/ rather than just in mydomain.ext/, then ./ would refer to the subfolder, not the root folder.

[Pc_Madness]

I usually get around this by including a variable somewhere higher up that defaults to "./" and use that when trying to do my includes. Change it to manually perhaps if your in a sub directory.

Probably not best way.. you could use $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] I think which will get you the path directly to header.php if your in a sub folder.

[72001]

assuming your webhost allows you to use .htaccess to set php settings, set an includes directory. for example here's mine.

php_value include_path ".:/users/m/marc2003/includes"

i now place any common php files inside this folder. now i can call on the file simply using

include 'header.php';

folder structure is now irrelevant as php will check in my includes folder first.

<?php

// Works as of PHP 4.3.0

set_include_path('/inc');

// Works in all PHP versions

ini_set('include_path', '/inc');

?>

[Bollard]

How rude of me, i completely forgot i made this thread!

Well, thanks for all the responses. Ive managed to fix it now, but ill give a nice detailed explanation of what i wanted and how i fixed it for the benefit of others.

Basically, I was trying to include my header (which is in my root directory) from a page in a sub directory.

I was able to call the header itself with

<?php include ('../header.php'); ?>

- but my problem was, the header contained my nav bar and my css <a href ="style.css">

By doing it this way, page in the subfolder was looking for the style.css in the subfolder directory, not in the root where it was with the header.

So, not only did i need to put

<?php include ('../header.php'); ?>

in each of the pages in the sub folders, i also needed to change my reference to the css to

href="/style.css"

- see the "/"

Finally, the reason i didnt use $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] is because im doing the development in a XAMPP test server on my pc - with my files not in the root. So i thought it would all screw up once i uploaded to my webserver. Plus, because im only going to need to go down to one sub folder, the "../" is a good enough solution for me.

Thanks for all the replies though - good to know theres a decent community here.