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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T13:47:16+00:00

In PHP how do you refer to files in an OS friendly manner? I’m

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In PHP how do you refer to files in an OS friendly manner? I’m looking at some code like

<?php
require_once(dirname(dirname(__FILE__)).'/common/config.inc.php');

...

that I have to run on a Windows machine, but it doesn’t parse the path right:

PHP Warning:  require_once(C:\workspace/common/config.inc.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in C:\workspace\somescript.php on line 2
PHP Fatal error:  require_once(): Failed opening required 'C:\workspace/common/config.inc.php' (include_path='.;C:\php5\pear') in C:\workspace\somescript.php on line 2

It looks like it’s trying to open with the forward-slashes which windows doesn’t like. The file C:\workspace\commonconfig.inc.php exists. The script is just not finding it because it has the forward-slashes right?

In the require_once statement, shouldn’t I be expressing the last part of the path in some os-friendly way? How do you do that?

In PHP, is there something similar to Python’s os.path.normpath(path) ? ..which takes a path-like string and returns the path appropriate to the running OS…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are a few things you could use.

    Instead of hardcoding the slashes, use the built-in constant DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, or as I prefer, make your own:

    define('DS', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR);

    ..it makes your code a bit more compact.

    Alternatively, use realpath() and express all your paths with unix-style forward slashes, since:

    On windows realpath() will change unix style paths to windows style.
    <?php
    echo realpath('/windows/system32');
    ?>

    The above example will output:
    C:\WINDOWS\System32

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