[WinMan]

Hi, I know how to create absolute filepaths in PHP, but do I need to do the same thing when linking to files in HTML?

PHP:

require_once dirname(__FILE__).'/includes/config.inc.php';

HTML:

"/includes/config.inc.php">View Files

When I mess around with the HTML above e.g. by duplicating the dirnames e.g. dirname(dirname(__FILE__))?>"/includes/config.inc.php>" I still get to config.inc.php.

Also, are the backslashes for a new folder performed in the PHP or the HTML?

[Abhey]

For starters, files get loaded differently in PHP (From the webserver) and HTML (From the clients computer). When you try to include a file through PHP, you will be talking to your webserver locally. This means that the entire disk is accessable (or so to say). When you’re trying to use dirname(__FILE__) (__DIR__ is available since PHP 5.3) the function will return the path of the file from the disk. It would look something like this on linux ‘ /home/user/public_html/ ‘. When an user visits your website in a webbrowser, all the files get loaded relatively from the URL.

So let’s take your link and see what happens:
The link would point to something like: ‘/home/user/public_html/includes/config.php’. (Since that’s what the function dirname returned.
This will make the web browser believe that it needs to go to

http://example.com/home/user/public_html/includes/config.php

Which, of course, cannot be found.

Now that you know this, it is easy to conclude what to point the link to. It would be /includes/config.php. As that is what the location of the file is relatively to the URL.

[Adelaid]

So all file locations which require server-side manipulation can be written in the script using functions like dirname(__FILE__)./includes/config.php but any links in the html should avoid these kind of absolute paths embedded into them via PHP tags and should just refer to the file link relatively e.g. /includes/config.php.

[SapnaVishwas]

You could refer to the base url of your website instead of an absolute directory

"/includes/config.inc.php">View Files