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

This is such a bad idea... You're trusting user input to access files — Machavity, Oct 02 '16 at 21:25
if we manually include it via include("content/articles/testseite.php"); it is correctly displayed — ben1806, Oct 02 '16 at 21:25
it probably is, but this is the only way atm, we know of to include this page. — ben1806, Oct 02 '16 at 21:27
A tutorial showing usage of `include()` based on a GET variable should be abandoned as soon as possible. — Te Ko, Oct 02 '16 at 22:02
Possible duplicate of [PHP - Failed to open stream : No such file or directory](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36577020/php-failed-to-open-stream-no-such-file-or-directory) — Vic Seedoubleyew, Oct 03 '16 at 15:54

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 16 '17 at 16:14

2

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.

edited Sep 16 '17 at 16:14

Panda

6,955
6
40
55

answered Oct 02 '16 at 21:30

Aina

28
1
3

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 02 '16 at 23:47

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.

There is a troubleshooting checklist for this frequent error message : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36577020/php-failed-to-open-stream-no-such-file-or-directory — Vic Seedoubleyew, Oct 03 '16 at 15:55

php use $_Get to include a .php

2 Answers2