PHP glob function from another directory - php

Question

I have some PDF files in public_html/site.com/pdf but in my index files is located in public_html/site.com/
I would like to use the glob() function to iterate through all the pdf files located In the pdf/ folder. The problem is that I am not getting any result.
Here is that I tried.
# public_html/index.php
<?php
foreach (glob("pdf/*.pdf") as $filename) {
echo "$filename <br/>";
}
?>

Answer 1

Alternatively, if you want to search your public folder recursively, you can use RecursiveDirectoryIterator to achieve this: Consider this example:
Lets say you have this directory structure:
/var/
/www/
/test/
/images/
image.png
/files/
/files2/
pdf.pdf <-- searching for some pdf files, happens to be here
<?php
$filetype_to_search = 'pdf';
$root_path = '/var/www/test'; // your doc root (or maybe C:/xampp/htdocs/) :p
foreach ($iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(
new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($root_path,
RecursiveDirectoryIterator::SKIP_DOTS),
RecursiveIteratorIterator::SELF_FIRST) as $value) {
if($value->getExtension() == $filetype_to_search) {
echo $value->getPathname() . "<br/>";
}
}
// ouput should be /var/www/test/images/files/files2/pdf.pdf
?>

Answer 2

My advice? Just set your full path as a variable & use it in cases like this.
In general you really cannot trust automatic methods used to get paths to be reliable for various reasons. This is why I have decided it’s best to set a base path explicitly as I explain here. I will assume you are on a standard Linux setup with /var/www/ as the root. So in your case you would set:
$BASE_PATH = '/var/www/public_html/site.com/';
And then your final code would be something like this:
$BASE_PATH = '/var/www/public_html/site.com/'
foreach (glob($BASE_PATH . "pdf/*.pdf") as $filename) {
echo "$filename <br/>";
}