Retrieve real path of file in Drupal 7
Drupal 7 uses the DrupalPublicStreamWrapper-class to handle all the files that are upload to a node or served to the audience. When you take a look at the node object you will see that the path where the file is stored is not directly clear. For example:
[0] => Array (
[fid] => 14
[display] => 1
[description] =>
[uid] => 1
[filename] => index.html
[uri] => public://htmlclean/index_3.html
[filemime] => text/html
[filesize] => 38941
[status] => 1
[timestamp] => 1296904269
)
In this example you can see that the file index.html is saved as index_3.html and available at the URI public://htmlclean/index_3.html. For one off my modules I needed the real path. I will explain how I retrieved it. In the example below the $file_array is the array as shown in the example above.
$scheme = file_uri_scheme($file_array['uri']);
$wrapper = file_stream_wrapper_get_instance_by_scheme($scheme);
$path = $wrapper->getDirectoryPath() . '/' . file_uri_target($file_array['uri']);
The result of $path is the following: sites/default/files/htmlclean/index_3.html. If you want a web-accessible URL . Simply use file_create_url($uri).
If there is a faster way to do this let me know! Or else you can use this snippet to retrieve the real path of file in Drupal 7.