[SPiNdustrious]

Hello,

I am trying to get a PHP script in my /Library/Webserver/Documents/ directory read the contents of a file in /Users/me/Public/, a directory that Apache has no trouble serving as I have made it accessible with the following addition to httpd.conf:

Alias /files "/Users/me/Public/"

<Directory "/Users/me/Public">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride Limit
Order deny,allow
deny from all
ErrorDocument 403 /403.files.php
</Directory>

A .htaccess file in the folder allows access to the directory for authorized IP addresses.

I am very confident that the PHP code is correct. I only get ambiguous "File /some/path/to/file could not be opened" error messages.

I am thinking that Apache might not be letting PHP access the file. Is my httpd.conf in need of changes?

If you can't give a diagnosis based on this info, any sort of file permissions guidlines with Apache/PHP would be of great help in sorting out this mess.

For that matter, what else should I investigate?

Thanks,

Peter

[Alex Duffield]

No, php should be able to read the file from anywere on your drive.. I do it all the time...

post the error, and the line of code where you try to read the file...

Are you using fopen() or include() or what???

[Simon Mundy]

Oh, the irony of having your signature unreadable by PHP

Perhaps it's just a simple permissions problem? Do a chown of 'nobody' on the files you want to access and they should be reachable.

[SPiNdustrious]

Originally posted by Alex Duffield:
No, php should be able to read the file from anywere on your drive.. I do it all the time...

post the error, and the line of code where you try to read the file...

Are you using fopen() or include() or what???

I am confident that there is a way. I love the limitless horizons of OS X and UNIX tools: the Classic ports of UNIX software were always so limiting. It's nice to know now that there's always a way to do what I want to do. But I digress...

Here is the error message:

Warning: fopen("/Users/peter/Public/Music/Erykah Badu/Baduizm/Next Lifetime.mp3 ", "rb") - No such file or directory in /Library/WebServer/Documents/lib/class.id3.php on line 215

This is a function in the class.id3.php file that I downloaded from http://leknor.com/code/. I modified it for clarity. It includes line 215:

function _read_v1() {
if (! ($f = fopen($this->file, 'rb')) ) {
$this->error = 'Unable to open ' . $file;
return false;
}

I had trouble with fopen() elsewhere. I had to use it in conjunction with fread()...

The permissions on the mp3 are 777 so it should be readable.

By the way, I use these snippets of code in a suite of pages I've made for my netradio station. Check out http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streaming/ for a good time...

Thanks,

Peter

[SPiNdustrious]

Changing owner to nobody or to www:www (Apache user) doesn't help.

Peter

[philzilla]

Originally posted by SPiNdustrious:
Warning: fopen("/Users/peter/Public/Music/Erykah Badu/Baduizm/Next Lifetime.mp3 ", "rb") - No such file or directory

i'm seeing breaks in that filepath. could that be our problem here?

[SPiNdustrious]

The spaces/breaks are correct, but maybe fopen/PHP are choking on them.

Peter

[philzilla]

try this in Terminal:
cd /Users/peter/Public/Music/Erykah Badu/Baduizm
and you'll get:
No such file or directory
because it's looking for "/Users/peter/Public/Music/Erykah"

you have to type this, for any action:
cd /Users/peter/Public/Music/Erykah\ Badu/Baduizm
that space has to be escaped

so... what happens when you replace those spaces with underscores? does it work then, or are we playing with a new error message now?

[SPiNdustrious]

OK, after some playing around, I have determined that fopen() doesn't like the spaces in the filenames.

I tried escaping the spaces with a backslash but that didn't work.

Does anyone know how to get around this obstacle?

I'm not renaming the files...

Peter

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by SPiNdustrious:
OK, after some playing around, I have determined that fopen() doesn't like the spaces in the filenames.

I tried escaping the spaces with a backslash but that didn't work.

Does anyone know how to get around this obstacle?

I'm not renaming the files...

Peter

Can you add quotes to the filename?

E.g:

fopen('"/Users/peter/Public/Music/Erykah Badu/Baduizm"','rb');

[SPiNdustrious]

Hey hey hey! What bright boy you are Simon Mundy! It works!

Thank you all very much for the assistance.

Peter

[philzilla]

*sniff* i suss the spaces and Mundy gets all the glory...

damn you, Mundy! you blighter!

IM me sometime, foo'

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by philzilla:
*sniff* i suss the spaces and Mundy gets all the glory...

damn you, Mundy! you blighter!

IM me sometime, foo'

Race you to the next bug...