What's the best way to get the Directory of a URL using php?

Im trying to set active classes in a nav using php. Now I need to set it by directory rather than complete URL as I have a main landing page for each directory with sub navigation for the other pages within the directory. I was going to use the following but this returns the full url.

function curPageURL() {
$pageURL = 'http';
    if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {$pageURL .开发者_JS百科= "s";}
$pageURL .= "://";
    if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
} else {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}

return $pageURL;}

 function activeLink($pageID) {
if ( $pageID == curPageURL() ) {
    echo 'class="active"';
} }

Then I call activeLink() in a nav item like this:

<li class="projectchild padding1"><a href="http://www.strangeleaves.com/nexus/index.php" <?php activelink('http://www.strangeleaves.com/nexus/index.php'); ?> >nexus</a></li>

Your suggestions on how to modify this to return the directory instead would be much appreciated.

If you want to extract the directory name from an URL you can use parse_url and dirname as:

$url = 'http://www.strangeleaves.com/nexus/index.php';
$arr = parse_url($url);
$path = dirname($arr['path']); // $path is now /nexus

You could get the full URL and then explode it to get down to your directory, like so:

$currentFile = $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"];
$parts = Explode('/', $currentFile);
$thisDir = $parts[count($parts) - 2];