Parsing and Writing Files in PHP - php

Question

I'm attempting to open a directory full of text files, and then read each file line-by-line, writing the information in each line to a new file. Within each text file in the directory I'm trying to iterate, the information is formed like:
JunkInfo/UserName_ID_Date_Location.Type
So I want to open every one of those text files and write a line to my new file in the form of:
UserName,ID,Date,Location,Type
Here's the code I've come up with so far:
<?php
$my_file = 'info.txt';
$writeFile = fopen($my_file, 'w') or die('Cannot open file: '.$my_file); //implicitly creates file
$files = scandir('/../DirectoryToScan');
foreach($files as $file)
{
$handle = #fopen($file, "r");
if ($handle)
{
while (($buffer = fgets($handle, 4096)) !== false)
{
$data = explode("_", $buffer);
$username = explode("/", $data[0])[1];
$location = explode(".", $data[3])[0];
$type = explode(".", $data[3])[1];
$stringToWrite = $username . "," . $data[1] . "," . $data[2] . "," . $location . "," . $type;
fwrite($writeFile, $stringToWrite);
}
if (!feof($handle))
{
echo "Error: unexpected fgets() fail\n";
}
fclose($handle);
}
}
fclose($writeFile);
?>
So my problem is, this doesn't seem to work. I just never get anything happening -- the output file is never written and I'm not sure why.

Answer 1

There is one potential issue with the scandir() line:
$files = scandir('/../DirectoryToScan');
The path begins with a /, which means that it is looking in the root of the server. So, the directory it's trying to read is /DirectoryToScan. To fix it, you can just remove the leading /. Of course, this could be a sample path for this example and may not actually apply to reality, or maybe you really do have a directory in the root of your system named that - in these cases, feel free to ignore this bit =P.
The next thing is when you're using fopen() on the files you're iterating through. scandir() returns the name of the file, not the full path. You'll need to concat the directory name and the file each time:
$dir = '../DirectoryToScan/';
$files = scandir($dir);
foreach($files as $file) {
$handle = #fopen($dir . $file, "r");
I'm currently running an older version of PHP, so directly-accessing array indexes from return-functions, such as with explode("/", $data[0])[1], doesn't work for me (it was added in PHP 5.4).
Other than that, the rest of your code looks like it should work fine (minus any potential logic/data errors that I may have overlooked).