Just to confirm, is using:
$_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]
the same as using: /
in HTML.
Eg. If current document is:
folder/folder/folder/index.php
I could use (in HTML) to start at the roort:
/somedoc.html
and to do the same in PHP I would have to use:
$_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "/somedoc.html";
Is that correct? Is there an easier way to do it?
<a href="<?php echo $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/hello.html'; ?>">go with php</a>
<br />
<a href="/hello.html">go to with html</a>
Try this yourself and find that they are not exactly the same.
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] renders an actual file path (on my computer running as it's own server, C:/wamp/www/
HTML's / renders the root of the server url, in my case, localhost/
But C:/wamp/www/hello.html and localhost/hello.html are in fact the same file
Yes, on the server side $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] is equivalent to / on the client side.
For example: the value of "{$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']}/images/thumbnail.png" will be the string /var/www/html/images/thumbnail.png on a server where it's local file at that path can be reached from the client side at the url http://example.com/images/thumbnail.png
No, in other words the value of $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] is not / rather it is the server's local path to what the server shows the client at example.com/
note: $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] does not include a trailing /
The Easiest way to do it is to have good site structure and write it as a constant.
DEFINE("BACK_ROOT","/var/www/");
Just / refers to the root of your website from the public html folder. DOCUMENT_ROOT refers to the local path to the folder on the server that contains your website.
For example, I have EasyPHP setup on a machine...
$_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] gives me file:///C:/Program%20Files%20(x86)/EasyPHP-5.3.9/www but any file I link to with just / will be relative to my www folder.
If you want to give the absolute path to a file on your server (from the server's root) you can use DOCUMENT_ROOT. if you want to give the absolute path to a file from your website's root, use just /.
Source: Stackoverflow.com