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Portable PHP code: DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR is not necessary
Submitted by alanhogan on January 6, 2008 - 5:48pm.
Tip | Code | PHP | cross-platform | linux | Mac | Programming | Unix | Windows
In attempting to write cross-platform, portable PHP code, I used PHP's DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR constant to write path strings, e.g. "..".DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR."foo", because the "proper" way to do it on Windows would be "..\foo" while on everything else (Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X) it would be "../foo".
Well, as Christian on php.net pointed out and the guys at Web Design Forums confirmed, that's completely unnecessary. As long as you use the forward slash, "/", you'll be OK. Windows doesn't mind it, and it's best for *nix operating systems.
(Note that DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR is still useful for things like explode-ing a path that the system gave you. Thanks to Shadowfiend for pointing this out.)
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