php use $_Get to include a .php

Question

at the moment a friend and I are working through a PHP tutorial. We are both new to php, but have some general experience in other languages.

We want to include "testseite.php" into our index.php The "testseite.php" is in the folder content/articles

The way the tutorial does it is to use

include("content/articles/".$_GET['include']);

but if we do that there is the following error:

Warning: include(/users/xxx/www/users/xxx/www/myCms/content/articles) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /users/flateric/www/users/flateric/www/myCms/index.php on line 5

Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening 'content/articles/' for inclusion (include_path='.') in /users/xxx/www/users/xxx/www/myCms/index.php on line 5

We thought ourselves that the problem might be, that it doubles the username (i changed it to xxx) and "users" and "www" in the path. Thanks for your help

Answer 1

In PHP, include means to load the file into the arguments, like loading a library. So, this error means the file /users/flateric/www/users/flateric/www/myCms/index.php does not exist. You should evaluate if the $_GET value points to a physical file.

Answer 2

It appears that $_GET['include'] is empty (or the include key is non-existent). This is causing the filename to include to be wrong. You're expecting to include a file named this:

content/articles/testseite.php

but actually getting an include for this:

content/articles/

Clearly, this is incorrect and causes the error. If the $_GET params don't include the include value (or it's blank), you should probably consider another approach, such as providing a default value or generating an error to the user.