PHP - Convert File system path to URL

Question

I often find that I have files in my projects that need to be accessed from the file system as well as the users browser. One example is uploading photos. I need access to t

Answer 1

Make it easy on yourself and just define the correct locations for both the filesystem and web folders and prepend the image filename with them.

Somewhere, you'd declare:

define('PATH_IMAGES_FS', '/var/www/example.com/uploads/');
define('PATH_IMAGES_WEB', 'uploads/');

Then you can just swap between paths depending on your need:

$image_file = 'myphoto.jpg';

$file = PATH_IMAGES_FS.$image_file;
//-- stores: /var/www/example.com/uploads/myphoto.jpg

print PATH_IMAGES_WEB.$image_file;
//-- prints: uploads/myphoto.jpg