PHP: Get absolute path from absolute URL

Question

I have an absolute path of a file, Is there a way to get the file absolute path

http://domainname/rootfolder/filename.php

and I wanna get something like

/home/domainname/public_html/foldername/filename.php

Answer 1

This is the easiest way:

$path = parse_url('http://domainname/rootfolder/filename.php', PHP_URL_PATH);

//To get the dir, use: dirname($path)

echo $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . $path;

That'll print you the full path.

Documentation:

parse_url

DOCUMENT_ROOT

dirname

Answer 2

You can use the parse_url function to get the local part of the URL.

Converting that into a file path then requires that you know where the document root of the webserver is. If it is the same server as the one the page is running on, then you can usually get that from $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].

It also depends on there being nothing preventing the URL from not being a direct mapping onto a file system (such as mod_rewrite, mod_alias, URIs being routed through an MVC framework, etc). For example, for a system I'm working on at the moment, if you were to hit http://example.com/blog/2012/01/01/ then the files involved would be /home/user/recall/script/recall.psgi and /home/user/recall/root/blog/day.tt but the DocumentRoot would be /home/user/recall/htdocs/)