Question

I inherited sites where previous developer used the spaghetti code below to handle relative paths for nav, image, and script items.

if(substr_count($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "/") <= 1){
    define('NAV', '');
    define('IMG', 'i/');
    define('INC', 'inc/');
}else{
    $z = 0;
    while($z < $i) {
        $current_pos .= '../';
        $z++;
    }
    define('NAV', $current_pos);
    define('IMG', $current_pos.'i/');
    define('INC', $current_pos.'inc/');
}

Used in the markup it would look something like this:

<a href="<? echo NAV; ?>index.php"><img src="<? echo IMG; ?>spacer.gif" alt="home" /></a>

The site is riddled with these; making it hard to move. I need a better solution without having to wade through all the pages to make changes. Was using getcwd() but it’s not proving reliable. Thanks!

Answer 1

Often it’s convenient to use the __FILE__ constant to find the location of the current file and surrounding directories:

define('APP_PATH', dirname(__FILE__) . "/");
$img = APP_PATH . "img/";
$js = APP_PATH . "js/";
// etc

// For includes...
require_once(APP_PATH . "include/file.php");
require_once(APP_PATH . "../upperleveldir/file2.php");