PHP include seems to make page interpret itself as a directory

Question

I have a page, index.php , like this (simplified):

<img src="content/banner.png"/>

The image loads fine. But when I include a certain (WordPress) script, like so,

<img src="content/banner.png"/>
<?php
    include('template-loader.php');
?>

the image no longer loads! I also notice the URL in the browser becomes index.php/ .

How is this possible? The image of course won't load because I'm using relative paths and it's looking for index.php/content/banner.jpg . True, I can use absolute paths to fix this issue, but I'd like to know what could be happening and how the problem might be fixed in PHP.

I'm testing on a local wamp installation and have disabled all mod_rewrite s and such, to be sure it's not something external causing the problem.

Answer 1

D'oh. Minutes after posting, I found the culprit, right in the script:

/**
 * Loads the correct template based on the visitor's url
 * @package WordPress
 */
if ( defined('WP_USE_THEMES') && WP_USE_THEMES )
        do_action('template_redirect');

It's doing some kind of a redirect; commenting this out makes everything work as expected.

I still don't really understand how this script can magically redirect to index.php/ as if it were a directory (and have the document actually load) but...

I will delete this question in the future if it doesn't seem to be helping anyone (based on views and votes).