Get directory structure from FTP using PHP - php

Question

I have ftp server with a lot of subfolders and files in it. I need to retrieve the folder structure from ftp, which shows names of all folders and subfolders from a specified starting path. I'm not interested in files included in each folder, only the directory tree. I'm using PHP and my server does not support mlsd.
Thanks for help.
I implemented my own recursive function, which for some reason is not working.
function ftp_list_files_recursive($ftp_stream, $path) {
$lines = ftp_rawlist($ftp_stream, $path);
$result = [];
if (is_array($lines) || is_object($lines)) {
foreach ($lines as $line) {
$exp0 = explode('<', $line);
if (sizeof($exp0) > 1):
$exp1 = explode('>', $exp0[1]);
if ($exp1[0] == 'DIR') {
$file_path=$path . "/" . ltrim($exp1[1]);
$result = array_merge($result, ftp_list_files_recursive($ftp_stream, $file_path));
} else {
$result[] = $file_path;
}
endif;
}
}
return $result;
}
The ftp_rawlist returns directory info as: 01-18-20 01:00PM <DIR> DirName so first I explode on < and check whether it was successful. If yes, then it means a string had DIR in it and it can be further exploded on >. It could have been done with regular expression, but that works for me now. If I print $file_path variable I see that it changes, so I assume the recursion works. However, the $result array is always empty. Any thoughts on that?

Answer 1

Start here: PHP FTP recursive directory listing.
You just need to adjust the code to:
the DOS-style listing you have from your FTP server (IIS probably) and
to collect only the folders.
function ftp_list_dirs_recursive($ftp_stream, $directory)
{
$result = [];
$lines = ftp_rawlist($ftp_stream, $directory);
if ($lines === false)
{
die("Cannot list $directory");
}
foreach ($lines as $line)
{
// rather lame parsing as a quick example:
if (strpos($line, "<DIR>") !== false)
{
$dir_path = $directory . "/" . ltrim(substr($line, strpos($line, ">") + 1));
$subdirs = ftp_list_dirs_recursive($ftp_stream, $dir_path);
$result = array_merge($result, [$dir_path], $subdirs);
}
}
return $result;
}