A Pattern Emerges - PHP

Want to list just the files matching a specific pattern? Use the neat little fnmatch() function, new in PHP 4.3, which matches strings against wildcard patterns. Here's a quick example:

<?php

// set directory name

$dir = "/bin";
// set pattern

$pattern = "e*";
// open directory and parse file list

if (is_dir($dir))

{

if ($dh = opendir($dir))

{

// iterate over file list

while (($filename = readdir($dh)) !== false)

{

// if filename matches search pattern, print it

if (fnmatch($pattern, $filename))

{

echo $dir . "/" . $filename . "\n";

}

}

// close directory

closedir($dh);

}

}
?>

Here's an example of the output:

/bin/ed
/bin/egrep
/bin/echo
/bin/env
/bin/ex

The * wildcard matches one or more characters; if this is not what you want, you can also use the ? wildcard to match a single character.

An alternative to using fnmatch() with the opendir() and readdir() functions is the glob() function, also new to PHP 4.3 - this function searches the current directory for files matching the specified pattern and returns them as an array. Consider the following rewrite of the example above, which demonstrates:

<?php

// set directory name

$dir = "/bin";
// set pattern

$pattern = "e*";
// change to named directory

chdir($dir);
// find files matching pattern

$files = glob($pattern);
// iterate over files array and print filenames

foreach ($files as $f)

{

echo $dir . "/" . $f . "\r\n";

}
?>

Since glob() looks in the current directory for files, remember to always
chdir() to the correct directory before executing glob().