Display breadcrumbs on your site using PHP

When you have a fully dynamic site it’s useful to show the user where they are by breaking down the URL structure so they can navigate backwards through the site. For example this url: http://papermashup.com/categories/jquery/ shows that ‘jquery’ is part of ‘categories’ so the user could navigate backwards through the url structure.

The Code

The first line of the function gets the REQUEST_URI (/path/to/file.php), splits the string (using ‘/’) into an array, then filters out any empty values. We then store the base url for the site in $base_url. Next we find the array key for the last value in the $path array. We then do a for loop to build up the breadcrumbs and determine where to put the a tag etc.

function breadcrumbs($separator = ' » ', $home = 'Home') {

    $path = array_filter(explode('/', parse_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PHP_URL_PATH)));
    $base_url = ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] ? 'https' : 'http') . '://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/';
    $breadcrumbs = array("<a href=\"$base_url\">$home</a>");

    $last = end(array_keys($path));

    foreach ($path AS $x => $crumb) {
        $title = ucwords(str_replace(array('.php', '_'), Array('', ' '), $crumb));
        if ($x != $last){
            $breadcrumbs[] = '<a href="$base_url$crumb">$title</a>';
        }else{
            $breadcrumbs[] = $title;
		}
    }

    return implode($separator, $breadcrumbs);
}	

Calling the function

This is the simple bit! Simply add the above function to the top of your PHP page and call the function as shown below. You can optionally add a separator symbol or specify the wording for ‘Home’.

echo breadcrumbs();