Why do I get a Warning and a Fatal error when I use ../ ?

Question

When I use ../mysqlConnect.php I get the following messages.

Warning: require_once(../mysqlConnect.php) [function.require-once]:
failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/etc...  

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required 
'../mysqlConnect.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/php5/lib/php') in /home/content/etc...    

When I use the directory name - mydir/mysqlConnect.php - everything works fine.

Answer 1

That's because you are not specifying the correct include path. ../ refers to parent directory. ../../ goes two directories back, ../../../ goes three of them back. If the mysqlConnect.php file is present in the same folder as your script, you don't need to specify ../ in the include.

Make sure that you specify the correct path. You can easily check whether or not you are specifying correct path like:

if (file_exists('../mysqlConnect.php'))
{
  echo 'Iam specifying the correct path !!';
}
else
{
  echo 'Well, I am not :(';
}

Answer 2

because it doesn't find your file then. to give a more specific answer I need to see you file-/folder-structure

Answer 3

Require is relative to the invoced script, not the script you call require() in. Use something like this to have an absolute path:

 require(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../mysqlConnect.php');

In PHP 5 you can also use DIR.

Answer 4

require_once('../mysqlConnect.php') asks PHP to look in the directory above the one your script is currently in for mysqlConnect.php.

Since your connection file appears to be in a mydir directory, require_once('mydir/mysqlConnect.php') works because it looks in that directory, which is contained by the one it's currently in.

Visual representation (assuming script.php is your script including that file):

dir/
  subdir/              # PHP looks here for ../mysqlConnect.php
    script.php
    mydir/             # PHP looks here for mydir/mysqlConnect.php
      mysqlConnect.php