Returns a parent directory's path (original) (raw)

dirname

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7)

dirname — Returns a parent directory's path

Description

dirname ( string $path [, int $levels = 1 ] ) : string

Note:

dirname() operates naively on the input string, and is not aware of the actual filesystem, or path components such as "..".

Caution

dirname() is locale aware, so for it to see the correct directory name with multibyte character paths, the matching locale must be set using the setlocale() function.

Parameters

path

A path.

On Windows, both slash (/) and backslash (\) are used as directory separator character. In other environments, it is the forward slash (/).

levels

The number of parent directories to go up.

This must be an integer greater than 0.

Return Values

Returns the path of a parent directory. If there are no slashes inpath, a dot ('.') is returned, indicating the current directory. Otherwise, the returned string ispath with any trailing/component removed.

Changelog

Examples

Example #1 dirname() example

<?php echo dirname("/etc/passwd") . PHP_EOL; echo dirname("/etc/") . PHP_EOL; echo dirname(".") . PHP_EOL; echo dirname("C:\\") . PHP_EOL; echo dirname("/usr/local/lib", 2);

The above example will output something similar to:

/etc / (or \ on Windows) . C:
/usr

See Also

• basename() - Returns trailing name component of path
• pathinfo() - Returns information about a file path
• realpath() - Returns canonicalized absolute pathname