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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T11:02:23+00:00

The setup: I have a standard .php file (index.php) that contains two includes, one

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The setup:

I have a standard .php file (index.php) that contains two includes, one for header (header.php) and one for footer (footer.php). The index.php file looks like this:

index.php

<?php
include header.php;
?>

<h2>Hello</h2>
<p class="editable">Lorem ipsum dolar doo dah day</p>

<?php
include footer.php;
?>

header.php like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>This is my page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 class="editable">My Website rocks</h1>

and footer .php like this:

<p>The end of my page</p>
</body>

I am writing a PHP script that allows you to edit any of the “.editable” items on a page. My problem is that these editable regions could appear in any included files as well as the main body of index.php.

My php code is grabbing the index.php file with file_get_contents(); which works well. I am also able to edit and save any “.editable” regions in index.php.

My issue:

I have been unable to find a way of “finding” the includes and parse through those for “.editable” regions as well. I am looking for suggestions on how I would work through all the includes in index.php – checking them for editable regions. Would I need to use regular expressions to find “include *.php”? I am unsure of where to even start…

For those of you who may wish to see my PHP code. I am making use of the PHP class: [link text][1] which allows me to write code like:

// load the class and file
$html = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load_file("index.php");

// find the first editable area and change its content to "edited"  
$html->find('*[class*=editable]', 0)->innertext = "Edited";

// save the file
$html->save(index.php);

[1]: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/manual_api.htm simple php dom parser

UPDATE

I have been playing around with regular expressions to try and match the includes. I am pretty rubbish at regex but I think I am getting close. Here is what I have so far:

$findinclude = '/(?:include|include_once|require|require_once)\s*(?:[a-z]|"|\(|\)|\'|_|\.|\s|\/)*(?=(?:[^\<\?]|[^\?\>])*\?>)/i';

This matches fairly well although it does seem to return the odd ) and ‘ when using preg_match. I am trying to add a bit of security into the regex to ensure it only matches between php tags – this part: (?=(?:[^\<\?]|[^\?>])*\?>) – but it only returns the first include on a page. Any tips on how to improve this regular expression? (I have been at it for about 6 hours)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Ok, I finally worked it out. If anyone is looking to find any include, include_once, require, require_once in a .php file then you can use the following regular expression with a php function like preg_match_all.

    '/(?:include|include_once|require|require_once)\s*(?:[a-z]|"|\(|\)|\'|_|\.|\s|\/)*(?=(?:[^\<\?])*\?>)/i';

    This looks for any includes etc within tags. Referencing this back to my original example. My code looks like this:

    $html = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load_file("index.php");

$findinclude = '/(?:include|include_once|require|require_once)\s*(?:[a-z]|"|\(|\)|\'|_|\.|\s|\/)*(?=(?:[^\<\?])*\?>)/i';

if (preg_match_all($findinclude, $html,$includes)):

    // shift the array to the left
    $incfiles = $includes[0];
    $i = 0;

    // then loop through the includes array and print our filename
    foreach ($incfiles as $inc) {
       print basename(preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s\.\_\/]/', '', $inc)."\n");
    }
endif;

    Job done! I can now work through this to edit each file as required.

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