PHP - Directory browsing from recursive to iterative - php

Question

Hello I am trying to make the following function iterative. It browses threw all directories and gives me all files in there.
function getFilesFromDirectory($directory, &$results = array()){
$files = scandir($directory);
foreach($files as $key => $value){
$path = realpath($directory.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$value);
if(!is_dir($path)) {
$results[] = $path;
} else if($value != "." && $value != "..") {
getFilesFromDirectory($path, $results);
$results[] = $path;
}
}
return $results;
}
I am sure that it is possible to make this function iterative but I really have no approach how I can do this.

Answer 1

Your going to want to use a few PHP base classes to implement this.
Using a RecursiveDirectoryIterator inside of a RecursiveIteratorIterator will allow you to iterate over everything within a directory regardless of how nested.
Its worth noting when looping over the $iterator below each $item is an object of type SplFileinfo. Information on this class can be found here: http://php.net/manual/en/class.splfileinfo.php
<?php
//Iterate over a directory and add the filenames of all found children
function getFilesFromDirectory($directory){
//Return an empty array if the directory could not be found
if(!is_dir($directory)){
return array();
}
$iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(
new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($directory)
);
$found = array();
foreach($iterator as $item){
if(method_exists($item, 'isFile') && $item->isFile()){
//Uncomment the below to exclude dot files
//if(method_exists($item, 'isDot') && $item->isDot()){
// continue;
//}
//Pathname == full file path
$found[] = $item->getPathname();
}
}
return $found;
}
An var_dump of some found files i did using this function as a test:
Hope this helps!