Document Root PHP

Question

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?

Answer 1

<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

Answer 2

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 /.