Recursively crawl data folder and create multidimensional array - php

Question

So I have the following situation. In my project folder I got a 'data' folder that contains .json files. These .json files also are structured in nested folders.
Something like:
/data
/content
/data1.json
/data2.json
/project
/data3.json
I'd like to create a function that recursively crawls through the data folder and stores all .json files in one multidimensional array, which makes it relatively easy to add static data for use for my project. So the expected result should be:
$data = array(
'content' => array(
'data1' => <data-from-data1.json>,
'data2' => <data-from-data2.json>
),
'project' => array(
'data3' => <data-from-data3.json>
)
);
UPDATE
I have tried the following, but this only returns the first level:
$data = array();
$directoryArray = scandir('./data');
foreach($directoryArray as $key => $value) {
$data[$key] = $value;
}
Is there a neat way to achieve this?

Answer 1

You should use RecursiveIteratorIterator. Skip some directories like . and .. . After this script loop other subdirectories.
//just to remove extension filename
function removeExtension($filename){
return preg_replace('/\\.[^.\\s]{3,4}$/', '', $filename);
}
$startpath= 'data';
$ritit = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($startpath), RecursiveIteratorIterator::CHILD_FIRST);
$result = [];
foreach ($ritit as $splFileInfo) {
if ($splFileInfo->getFilename() == '.') continue;
if ($splFileInfo->getFilename() == '..') continue;
if ($splFileInfo->isDir()){
$path = [removeExtension($splFileInfo->getFilename()) => []];
}else{
$path = [removeExtension($splFileInfo->getFilename()) => json_decode(file_get_contents($splFileInfo->getPathname(), $splFileInfo->getFilename()))];
}
for ($depth = $ritit->getDepth() - 1; $depth >= 0; $depth--) {
$path = [$ritit->getSubIterator($depth)->current()->getFilename() => $path];
}
$result = array_merge_recursive($result, $path);
}
print_r($result);
My json files contain:
data1.json: {"foo": "foo"}
data2.json: {"bar": "bar"}
data3.json: {"foobar": "foobar"}
The result is:
Array
(
[content] => Array
(
[data1] => stdClass Object
(
[foo] => foo
)
[data2] => stdClass Object
(
[bar] => bar
)
)
[project] => Array
(
[data3] => stdClass Object
(
[foobar] => foobar
)
)
)

Answer 2

You do not really have to use RecursiveIteratorIterator. As a programmer you should always know how to deal with recursive data structures, may it be an xml content, a folder tree or else. You may write a recursive function to handle such tasks.
Recursive functions are functions which call themselves to process through data with multiple layers or dimensions.
For example, scanFolder function below is designed to process contents of a directory, and it calls itself when it is encountered with a sub-directory.
function scanFolder($path)
{
echo "scanning dir: '$path'";
$contents = array_diff(scandir($path), ['.', '..']);
$result = [];
foreach ($contents as $item) {
$fullPath = $path . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $item;
echo "processing '$fullPath'";
// process folder
if (is_dir($fullPath)) {
// process folder contents
$result[$item] = scanFolder($fullPath);
} else {
// for this specific program, you should perform a check here to see if the file is a json
// collect the result
$result[$item] = json_decode(file_get_contents($fullPath));
}
}
return $result;
}
IMO, this is a cleaner and more expressive way to accomplish this task and I wonder what others have to say about this statement.

Answer 3

I think that you can use RecursiveDirectoryIterator, there is an documentation about this class.