Question

I have a files structure like this:

Class (folder):
 - User.php
 - Rule.php
Scripts (folder):
 - user.php (in lowercase)
 - otherscript.php

index.php

Rule class (Class/Rule.php):

namespace My\Namespace;
require_once 'Gender.php';
require_once 'User.php';

class Rule
{
...

User class (Class/User.php):

namespace My\Namespace;
require_once 'Gender.php';
class User {
...

In the Rule class I use a ‘require_once’ that includes the User class (require_once ‘User.php’), the problem is that when I include de Rule class in ‘otherscript.php’ it includes me both (script/user.php and class/User.php). How can I avoid this?

Answer 1

You can either require_once the element relative to itself rather the to whatever the current working dir may be:

   require_once __DIR__.'/Gender.php';
   require_once __DIR__.'/User.php';

… but it would be even better to just define an autoloader (use the SPL autoloader rather then the old __autoload function) which takes care of that for you, removing the need for most include/require statements for classes.