Question

I seem to be having an issue with using variables to create directories via the mkdir() function. The variable is being parsed from the URL. See my coding below:

$pageURL = 'http';
 if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {$pageURL .= "s";}
 $pageURL .= "://";
 if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
 $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
} else {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}
$pageURL;
$url = $pageURL;
$parse = parse_url($url);
$dirID = $parse['query'];

I’m using define() to define the folder path since the path is used several times throughout the code:

 define("DESTINATION_FOLDER", "mydir/".$dirID."/");

And here is the if statement telling it to create the directory if it doesn’t exist:

if (!@file_exists(DESTINATION_FOLDER)) {      
    mkdir(DESTINATION_FOLDER);
}

Sounds pretty straightforward but for some reason the variable $dirID does not get read, and the file instead uploads to the mydir directory. What’s really odd, is that if I hardcode the variable to something like $dirID = “28”, it works and the file gets uploaded like mydir/28/file.jpg. I have used this method to pass variables many times before, but never to pass a variable to be used in the mkdir function. Does anyone know what might be going on?

Thank you in advance for any and all help.

Answer 1

This is all in the comments above, but I’ll spell it out:

The query part is never actually passed to URL, and therefore not passed into “parse”.

I’ll paraphrase your code:

1. Construct URL using protocal (http/https) and server name and URL. (Note – you’re not appending the query at this point)
2. Parse the url (which does not include the query)
3. Get the query from the parse (which still isn’t there)

$_SERVER[‘QUERY_STRING’] is the bit you’re looking for – you can either add to the URL and then parse, or just use it directly

$dirID = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];

---

But why you’d use that to create the directory is a bit (A LOT) dangerous as it’ll invariably contain invalid parameters. As suggested in the comments, you probably mean to get a particular value for a query string parameter? Or is it the actual string. You can get these from:

// For ?DirectoryName
$aKeys = array_keys($_GET)
$directoryName = isset($aKeys[0]) ? $aKeys[0] : '';

or

// For ?ParamName=DirectoryName
$directoryName = $_GET['ParamName']

I then also suggest you use a preg_match to validate the directory name meets an acceptable format and to avoid crap being created!