Using variables as html class

Excellent! Thank you, it works perfectly now after a bit of tweaking. However one more question regarding this topic (also sparked from one issue I was having). As I was testing the variables I just used echo to display the variables on screen so I could see what they were returning and for the longest time my $url and get_bloginfo(‘url’) appeared to be returning the exact same value, until I realized that the get_bloginfo didn’t put a / at the end, so my $homeURL kept returning “null”. I had to change it to get_bloginfo(‘url’).”/” so my $homeURL would return the result “current”.

Now my question is, is there a way that I can make the $url check if it begins with a certain string and disregard anything that comes after it? For instance, if my custom permalinks start with http://www.site.com/blog for every post, I want the blog link in my nav bar to stay activated. When the function runs to assign the url to $url, it will read http://www.site.com/blog/category/year/month/post-title, but since it begins with http://www.site.com/blog I want $homeURL to still return true and give me the “current” value – and disregard whatever comes after such as the category, year, etc. So rather than == is there a “begins with” type of operator or is this going to be much more involved?

Anyway here’s the final working code:

<?php $url = (!empty($_SERVER['HTTPS'])) ? "https://".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] : "http://".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>
		  <?php
              $homeURL = ( $url == get_bloginfo('url').'/' ) ? 'current' : 'null';
			  $workURL = ( $url == get_bloginfo('url').'/work' ) ? 'current' : 'null';
			  $bioURL = ( $url == get_bloginfo('url').'/bio' ) ? 'current' : 'null';
			  $contactURL = ( $url == get_bloginfo('url').'/contact' ) ? 'current' : 'null';
		  ?>
      <div id="navbar">
        <ul id="navigation">

          <li id="navigation-1"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/" title="home" class="<?php echo "$homeURL" ?>"><span>home</span></a></li>
          <li id="navigation-2"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/work" title="work" class="<?php echo "$workURL" ?>"><span>work</span></a></li>
          <li id="navigation-3"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/bio" title="bio" class="<?php echo "$bioURL" ?>"><span>bio</span></a></li>
          <li id="navigation-4"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/contact" title="contact" class="<?php echo "$contactURL" ?>"><span>contact</span></a></li>
        </ul>
      </div><!-- navbar -->

Oh the power of Google. Solved it finally using strpos(); function.

Here’s the new working code:

<?php
			  $homeURL = ( $url == get_bloginfo('url').'/' ) ? 'current' : 'null';

			  $workcheck = strpos($url, get_bloginfo('url').'/work');
			  $workURL = ($workcheck === false) ? "null" : "current";

			  $biocheck = strpos($url, get_bloginfo('url').'/bio');
			  $bioURL = ($biocheck === false) ? "null" : "current";

			  $contactcheck = strpos($url, get_bloginfo('url').'/contact');
			  $contactURL = ($contactcheck === false) ? "null" : "current";
		  ?>

In the link class field I kept it as:
<?php echo "$homeURL" ?>