Accessing Windows' special named folders in PHP fopen streams

Question

Hi Everyone,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Folders

I am having a problem with accessing a special folder in a fopen stream in php.

Example

$fp = fopen("%USERPROFILE%/Desktop/text.txt", 'wb');
fwrite($fp, $data);
fclose($fp);

I try this with sysinternals process monitor running to try and see what is actually happening and it looks something like this.

C:/xampp/htdocs/test/%USERPROFILE%/Desktop/text.txt  PATH NOT FOUND

Well apparently two thing are going wrong, PHP is treating the path as a relative path and the special folder is not being evaluated.

Answer 1

$fp = fopen("{$_ENV['USERPROFILE']}\\Desktop\\text.txt", 'wb');

See $_ENV on the manual and also getenv().

As Johannes Rössel said, this will only work in limited circumstances. You can use this internal function instead:

#include<Shlobj.h>

PHP_FUNCTION(win_get_desktop_folder)
{
    char szPath[MAX_PATH];

    if (zend_parse_parameters_none() == FAILURE)
        RETURN_NULL();

    if (SUCCEEDED(SHGetSpecialFolderPathA(NULL, szPath,
        CSIDL_DESKTOP, FALSE))) {
        RETURN_STRING(szPath, 1);
    } else {
        RETURN_FALSE;
    }
}