Examining the include_path

- Specifying the path to include files…is the most efficient way of working…with server-side includes in PHP.…All of the examples in this chapter…have been relative to the current document.…For example this is relativedoc.php,…it includes two external files, copyright.php on line 1,…and then on line 12, para.html.…And in both cases,…the path is relative to the current document.…You can also use an absolute path,…but I think that relative paths are more flexible…because they are not dependent on knowing…the directory structure of the web server.…

But there is one other way to tell PHP…where to find include files,…and that's to use the server's include path.…So we'll take a look at that.…The include path specifies where PHP…will look automatically for server-side includes…if a path hasn't been specified in the script.…And to find out where the include path on your server is,…there's a useful function,…I've got that here in this file include_path.php,…it's get_include_path and I'm using echo to display it,…so if we load this into a browser,…