Accessing Windows Objects with PHP? - php

Question

I made a tool to organize file content in a specific way. These files are located all over my pc which runs on Windows 7. The tool is made up of two parts: 1 the interface holding a form. 2 the script to do the work.
Instead of having to manually write the full path to a certain directory to the main script, I'd rather have the tool search for it and retrieve it seamlessly. I'm thinking of maybe adding a textfield and a button, in which I can enter the directory's name I'm looking for and after clicking the button, retrieve the directory's full pathname, print it to the same textfield and then pass it along to the program itself.
I've searched for several day for ways to have PHP interact with Windows (maybe with window's search object), but all I've found is very looong documentation on the COM and then on the NET. These however seem to strictly deal with accessing Office objects, since most of the available examples are about Excel or Word objects.
How can I accomplish the functionality I want to add to my interface?
To avoid further confusion, this is the image of the Window's object I'm referring to > Windows Starup Search Field

Answer 1

Use this handy function - just point it to the root of your filesystem and it will return an array with all the matching files - I mean, matched by the regular expression pattern you provide to the function.
// PREG_FIND_RECURSIVE - go into subdirectorys looking for more files
// PREG_FIND_DIRMATCH - return directorys that match the pattern also
// PREG_FIND_DIRONLY - return only directorys that match the pattern (no files)
// PREG_FIND_FULLPATH - search for the pattern in the full path (dir+file)
// PREG_FIND_NEGATE - return files that don't match the pattern
// PREG_FIND_RETURNASSOC - Instead of just returning a plain array of matches,
// return an associative array with file stats
// to use more than one simply seperate them with a | character
define('PREG_FIND_RECURSIVE', 1);
define('PREG_FIND_DIRMATCH', 2);
define('PREG_FIND_FULLPATH', 4);
define('PREG_FIND_NEGATE', 8);
define('PREG_FIND_DIRONLY', 16);
define('PREG_FIND_RETURNASSOC', 32);
function preg_find($pattern, $start_dir='.', $args=NULL)
{
$files_matched = array();
$fh = #opendir($start_dir);
if($fh)
{
while (($file = readdir($fh)) !== false)
{
if (strcmp($file, '.')==0 || strcmp($file, '..')==0) continue;
$filepath = $start_dir . '/' . $file;
if (preg_match($pattern, ($args & PREG_FIND_FULLPATH) ? $filepath : $file))
{
$doadd = is_file($filepath)
|| (is_dir($filepath) && ($args & PREG_FIND_DIRMATCH))
|| (is_dir($filepath) && ($args & PREG_FIND_DIRONLY));
if ($args & PREG_FIND_DIRONLY && $doadd && !is_dir($filepath)) $doadd = false;
if ($args & PREG_FIND_NEGATE) $doadd = !$doadd;
if ($doadd)
{
if ($args & PREG_FIND_RETURNASSOC) // return more than just the filenames
{
$fileres = array();
if (function_exists('stat'))
{
$fileres['stat'] = stat($filepath);
$fileres['du'] = $fileres['stat']['blocks'] * 512;
}
//if (function_exists('fileowner')) $fileres['uid'] = fileowner($filepath);
//if (function_exists('filegroup')) $fileres['gid'] = filegroup($filepath);
//if (function_exists('filetype')) $fileres['filetype'] = filetype($filepath);
//if (function_exists('mime_content_type')) $fileres['mimetype'] = mime_content_type($filepath);
if (function_exists('dirname')) $fileres['dirname'] = dirname($filepath);
if (function_exists('basename')) $fileres['basename'] = basename($filepath);
//if (isset($fileres['uid']) && function_exists('posix_getpwuid ')) $fileres['owner'] = posix_getpwuid ($fileres['uid']);
$files_matched[$filepath] = $fileres;
}
else array_push($files_matched, $filepath);
}
}
if ( is_dir($filepath) && ($args & PREG_FIND_RECURSIVE) ) $files_matched = array_merge($files_matched, preg_find($pattern, $filepath, $args));
}
closedir($fh);
}
return $files_matched;
}
Example usage:
$arr = preg_find('/./','z:\temp');
var_dump($arr);
Example output:
Another example:
$arr = preg_find('/\.tmp$/i','z:\temp',PREG_FIND_RECURSIVE | PREG_FIND_DIRMATCH);
var_dump($arr);

Answer 2

On the first place, thanks to #IVO GELOV for the handy script you generously shared with me.
In cases someone else needs this info.
After much searching, I found out that I only needed to use Tkinter to navigate through directories. It offers a Dialog Box with two methods: one to get the full path to a file and the other to a directory, which was what I needed. The path can be stored in a variable.
Thanks to all for the input.