PHP Search for image file in two specific directories - php

Question

I need to look for and echo an image file name that's located in either of these two directories named 'photoA' or 'photoB'.
This is the code I started with that tries to crawl through these directories, looking for the specified file:
$file = 'image.jpg';
$dir = array(
"http://www.mydomain.com/images/photosA/",
"http://www.mydomain.com/images/photosB/"
);
foreach( $dir as $d ){
if( file_exists( $d . $file )) {
echo $d . $file;
} else {
echo "File not in either directories.";
}
}
I feel like I'm way off with it.

Answer 1

You cannot use a url in file_exists, you need to use an absolute or relative path (relative to the runnings script) in the file-system of the server, so for example:
$dir = array(
"images/photosA/",
"../images/photosB/",
"/home/user/www/images/photosB/"
);
You can also use paths relative to the root of the web-server if you don't know the exact path and add the document root before that:
$dir = array(
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/images/photosA/",
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/images/photosB/"
);
(or you use it once, where you use file_exists())

Answer 2

Since you are running this script from within the root directory of your website, you won't need to define 'http://www.mydomain.com/' as this will cause Access Denied issues as it is not an absolute/relative file path. Instead, if the images/ folder is at the same directory level as your PHP script, all you will need to do is
$dir = array(
"images/photosA/",
"images/photosB/"
);
Otherwise, just add the absolute path as needed to make it work, but you can not put the. The rest seems as if it should work fine.

Answer 3

As the others said, file_exists() is for local files.
If you REALLY need to look for files over http, you can use :
$file = 'http://www.domain.com/somefile.jpg';
$file_headers = #get_headers($file);
if($file_headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found') {
$exists = false;
}
else {
$exists = true;
}
NOTE: This relies on the server returning a 404 if the image does not exist. If the server instead redirects to an index page or a pporly-coded error page, you could get a false success.