PHP reading files in a directory
Reading files in a directory with PHP used to be done procedurally as follows.
/* open the directory that the current file resides in and display file names */
$handle = opendir(dirname(__FILE__));
if ($handle) {
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
echo $file . "\n";
}
}
closedir($handle);
}
The code above works ok and generally gives us enough information. But with PHP 5 Object Oriented Capabilities, we can use a much better approach.
/* open the directory that the current file resides in and display file names */
$directory = new DirectoryIterator(dirname(__FILE__));
foreach ($directory as $file) {
if (!$file->isDot()) {
echo $file->getFilename() . "\n";
}
}
As our directory uses an iterator approach, we can loop through our values with the foreach statement making it a lot cleaner. We also have a lot of methods we can use to get more information about the files we find.
$directory = new DirectoryIterator(dirname(__FILE__));
$class_methods = get_class_methods($directory);
foreach ($class_methods as $method_name) {
echo $method_name . "\n";
}
__construct
getFilename
getBasename
isDot
rewind
valid
key
current
next
__toString
getPath
getPathname
getPerms
getInode
getSize
getOwner
getGroup
getATime
getMTime
getCTime
getType
isWritable
isReadable
isExecutable
isFile
isDir
isLink
getLinkTarget
getRealPath
getFileInfo
getPathInfo
openFile
setFileClass
setInfoClass
With all those methods available, we should have no problem at all traversing and interrogating our directory structure's with PHP.
