PHP - Directory browsing from recursive to iterative

Question

Hello I am trying to make the following function iterative. It browses threw all directories and gives me all files in there.

function getFilesFromDirectory($directory, &$results = array()){
    $files = scandir($directory);

    foreach($files as $key => $value){
        $path = realpath($directory.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$value);
        if(!is_dir($path)) {
            $results[] = $path;
        } else if($value != "." && $value != "..") {
            getFilesFromDirectory($path, $results);
            $results[] = $path;
        }
    }
    return $results;
}

I am sure that it is possible to make this function iterative but I really have no approach how I can do this.

I doubt so. Directory tree is a tree. You don't know how deep it is beforehand. — Alex Blex
– Alex Blex, Commented Sep 29, 2017 at 10:51
It is impossible without moving the push/pop operation from a recursive function call to a data structure - i.e. you can make the code iterative (at some cost) but not the operation. What are you trying to achieve by doing this? — symcbean
– symcbean, Commented Sep 29, 2017 at 11:35
@Jparkinson: no - this just hides the recursion behind an object - that's why you can't call the class statically. — symcbean
– symcbean, Commented Sep 29, 2017 at 11:39
But does it not achieve what the question author wants? Recursion through a directory returning all paths of files within it? — JParkinson1991
– JParkinson1991, Commented Sep 29, 2017 at 11:41

Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-20 09:12:55Z

3

Your going to want to use a few PHP base classes to implement this.

Using a RecursiveDirectoryIterator inside of a RecursiveIteratorIterator will allow you to iterate over everything within a directory regardless of how nested.

Its worth noting when looping over the $iterator below each $item is an object of type SplFileinfo. Information on this class can be found here: http://php.net/manual/en/class.splfileinfo.php

<?php 

//Iterate over a directory and add the filenames of all found children
function getFilesFromDirectory($directory){
    //Return an empty array if the directory could not be found
    if(!is_dir($directory)){
        return array();
    }

    $iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(
        new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($directory)
    );

    $found = array();
    foreach($iterator as $item){
        if(method_exists($item, 'isFile') && $item->isFile()){
            //Uncomment the below to exclude dot files
            //if(method_exists($item, 'isDot') && $item->isDot()){
            //  continue;
            //}
            
            //Pathname == full file path
            $found[] = $item->getPathname();
        }
    }

    return $found;
}

An var_dump of some found files i did using this function as a test:

Hope this helps!

edited Jun 20, 2020 at 9:12

CommunityBot

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answered Sep 29, 2017 at 11:26

JParkinson1991

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1 Comment

TheKeymaster Over a year ago

Approved! Thanks for your help @JParkinson1991.

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