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

I've used this and worked with me:

$file_path=str_replace('\\','/',__file__);
$file_path=str_replace($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'],'',$file_path);
$path='http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/'.$file_path;

And if you need the directory name in url format add this line:

define('URL_DIR',dirname($path));

Answer 2

For example, i used this one to convert C:\WAMP\WWW\myfolder\document.txt to http://example.com/myfolder/document.txt use this one:

$file_path=str_replace('\\','/',$file_path);
$file_path=str_replace($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'],'',$file_path);
$file_path='http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$file_path;

Answer 3

The code below is well commented:

function pathToURL($path) {
  //Replace backslashes to slashes if exists, because no URL use backslashes
  $path = str_replace("\\", "/", realpath($path));

  //if the $path does not contain the document root in it, then it is not reachable
  $pos = strpos($path, $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
  if ($pos === false) return false;

  //just cut the DOCUMENT_ROOT part of the $path
  return substr($path, strlen($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']));
  //Note: usually /images is the same with http://somedomain.com/images,
  //      So let's not bother adding domain name here.
}
echo pathToURL('some/path/on/public/html');

Answer 4

All answers here promotes str_replace() which replaces all occurences anywhere in the string, not just in the beginning. preg_replace() will make sure we only do an exact match from the beginning of the string:

function remove_path($file, $path = UPLOAD_PATH) {
  return preg_replace("#^($path)#", '', $file);
}

Windows can be a problem where directory separators / and \. Make sure you replace the directory separators first:

function remove_path($file, $path = UPLOAD_PATH) {
  $file = preg_replace("#([\\\\/]+)#", '/', $file);
  $path = preg_replace("#([\\\\/]+)#", '/', $path);
  return preg_replace("#^($path)#", '', $file);
}

I would play with something like the following. Make note of realpath() and rtrim().

function webpath($file) {
  $document_root = rtrim(preg_replace("#([\\\\/]+)#", '/', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']), '/');
  $file = preg_replace("#([\\\\/]+)#", '/', realpath($file));
  return preg_replace("#^($document_root)#", '', $file);
}

echo webpath(__FILE__); // Returns webpath to self
echo webpath('../file.ext'); // Relative paths
echo webpath('/full/path/to/file.ext'); // Full paths

Answer 5

More accurate way (including host port) would be to use this

function path2url($file, $Protocol='http://') {
    return $Protocol.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].str_replace($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'], '', $file);
}

Answer 6

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