Question

I’m trying to include a file but it doesn’t seem to be working – here’s the entire code:

if (file_exists('config/categories.php')) {
    include ('config/categories.php'); 
} 

foreach ($categories as $cat_sef => $cat_name) {
    echo '<a href="'.$full_domain.$cat_sef.'" alt="#">'.$cat_name.'</a><br />';
}

The contents of config/categories.php is simply an array:

$categories = array("category-1" => "Category 1", 
"category-2" => "Category 2", 
"category-3" => "Category 3")

I know the file exists because the following works:

if (file_exists('config/categories.php')) {
    echo "file exists";
}

However if I replace the array in categories.php with say:

echo "testing";

Nothing will display either. So as far as I can see, the file exists but it doesn’t seem to be including some how. If I rename the categories file to something else I will receive a ‘no such file’ error (file does not exist).

With the original code snippet, the error I get is:

Notice: Undefined variable: categories

But as you can see, it is defined in the categories.php file.

The ONLY way it works is to put the array in place of the if (file_exists) part of my code, which I don’t want to do because other parts rely on that categories.php file, so I don’t want to dupe an array in multiple files.

Does anyone have any idea what this could be? Let me know if you need any more info.

Answer 1

You have two options here :

• use include(dirname(__FILE__).'/config/categories.php') to make sure you are including this same file and not another ‘config/categories.php’

• double check that categories.php includes opening php tags like this <?php. Seems obvious, but I have seen this more than once in code reviews.

Hope this helps !