How can I build a file/dir path map in PHP? - php

Question

I'm a Frontend developer and I've decided to expand my knowledge learning PHP. I'm still learning the syntax / ways of accomplishing stuff so please bear with me.
As I began working on my first PHP project I realised that I needed to create a path map just to keep things clean and DRY.
This is what my php file structure looks like by now:
That is easy to represent using a JSON like data structure, but I've found a embarrassing hard time trying to achieve that using PHP data types ( I'm still learning the syntax / ways of doing things ).
I've been reading a bit and I decided to use some associative arrays,
I've come up with this solution, which works but I wanted to check if a simpler solution is possible. ( I'm aiming to learn the best practices of PHP )
See:
$paths = array(
'dirs' => array(
'base' => '/php/'
)
);
$paths['dirs']['common'] = $paths['dirs']['base'] . 'common/';
$paths['dirs']['home'] = $paths['dirs']['base'] . 'home/';
$paths['files'] = array(
'home' => $paths['dirs']['home'] . 'home.php',
'header' => $paths['dirs']['common'] . 'header.php',
'scripts' => $paths['dirs']['common'] . 'scripts.php',
'footer' => $paths['dirs']['common'] . 'footer.php',
'core' => $paths['dirs']['base'] . 'core.php',
'business-variables' => $paths['dirs']['base'] . 'business-variables.php'
);
Am I doing bad practices here?
Is there a better / simpler / standard way of doing this?

Answer 1

If you need to work with files - the best and easiest way is use DirectoryIterator. In this case each file will be object and you can use his methods. Here a small example:
// or '/php/' in your case
$path = '/';
foreach (new DirectoryIterator($path) as $file) {
if ($file->isDot()) continue;
if ($file->isDir()) {
print $file->getFilename() . '<br/>';
}
}

Answer 2

Provided you can't just read the folder structure using DirectoryIterator...
For readability I'd do something like this:
class FileStructure {
const BASE = '/php/';
const COMMON = 'common/%s';
const HOME = 'home/%s';
public function Paths(){
return array(
'home' => $this->Home('home.php'),
'header' => $this->Common('header.php')
);
}
private function Common($file = null){
return sprintf(static::BASE.static::COMMON, $file);
}
private function Home($file = null){
return sprintf(static::BASE.static::HOME, $file);
}
}