New and Improved inclusion

This week was not only filled with going to the university and playing around with PHP-SAT, it was also filled with (a lot of) preparation for the Flitsjacht, a game for scouts in our region. Organizing a game that is played by over 150 people in 11 teams in an area of about 10 square kilometers takes a lot of time, but the photo's are priceless.

Organizing this game does not mean that there is no progress on PHP-SAT, revision 256 holds a few new things. It includes some new tests, a few extra lines of source code and a lot of new functionality! The basis for the '--complex-inclusion'-flag is finished with the evaluation of the internal functions 'include','include_once', 'require' and 'require_once'.

The implementation of this evaluation was not that easy because of a small detail in the strategy 'find-in-path'. This strategy takes a list of paths and tries to find a file in those paths with a given file name. It does this by checking the existence of each 'path + file name'. This would always return the full 'path + file name', the next paragraph explains why this is useful, and worked like a charm. Until I tried it with a file name that was available at the current-directory! I did not get back the absolute path, but the original given file name. It took me a while to figure out that the strategy first checks for a file with only the given file name without taking the paths into account. I solved this by just looping over the list with directories and now everything is fine.

But why do we need the absolute path to include files? This makes it a lot easier to implement the logic of the 'include_once' and 'require_once' functions. Before we include a file we check if the file was already included by using the absolute path. The absolute path is necessary to prevent false positives in this case. False negatives are prevented by normalizing every path after a file is found. This normalization removes all '.' and '..' steps in a path and returns the direct and absolute path.

Next step: evaluate some more internal functions, especially the 'define' function that defines constants.