Get a sub-directory folder in the URL and echo it .

Question

How do I get the value of an URL eg. www.example.php/folders/crowd? I\'m trying to echo out crowd with PHP. I have tried using the $_SERVER [\'SCRIPTNAME\

Answer 1

To get the current directory of the file (which is just "crowd" in your "www.example.php/folders/crowd" example), use:

$cur_dir = basename(dirname($_SERVER[PHP_SELF]))

If you just want the file, then try this:

$cur_file = $_SERVER[PHP_SELF];

Answer 2

Maybe you want to have a look at the Apache module mod_rewrite. Many web hosting provider offer this module. If you even operate a dedicated server owned by you, it's no problem to install / enable this module.

mod_rewrite can be used to transparently "transform" request URLs to requests for defined php scripts with query string parameters derived from the original request. This is often used for SEO-friendly URLs like http://mywebpage/article/how-to-cook-pizza-123.html. In this case a script might be invoked taking only the 123 from the URL as a parameter (e.g. http://mywebpage/article/how-to-cook-pizza-123.html => /article.php?id=123).

In your case you could use a configuration like this (put this into an .htaccess file or your Apache/vhost configuration):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^folders/[A-Za-z]+$ showfolder.php?user=$1 [L]

Your showfolder.php might look like this:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['user'])) {
        echo htmlentities($_GET['user']);
    } else {
        echo "No parameter found.";
    }
?>

Any word after folders/ that consists of letters (A-Z and a-z) will be taken as the user parameter of your php script. Then you can easily echo this value, fetch it from a database or whatever. For example, a request for /folders/crowd will result in your script being executed with this parameter: showfolder.php?user=crowd. The user of your website won't see anything of this hidden internal forwarding.

If you use some other web server software (nginx, ...): There are similar modules for other web server products, too.

Answer 3

You can use parse_url, because scriptname will return the real php file execution "index.php" for example.

php > var_dump(parse_url('http://www.example.php/folders/crowd', PHP_URL_PATH));
// "/folders/crowd"

But if you want just the last part you can:

$tmp = explode('/', 'www.example.php/folders/crowd');
var_dump(end($tmp));
// "crowd"

Or another way:

var_dump(basename(parse_url('http://www.example.php/folders/crowd', PHP_URL_PATH)));
// "crowd"