Question

Anybody know of a ready-made php class which can read a file-system directory recursively (including all files and sub-directories) and return an array or object or JSON string or XML of the structure?

I would do this myself but a client just called and is insisting on it being done today. Yay.

Answer 1

You can make use of the in-build RecursiveDirectoryIterator^­Docs class to create your wished outcome. In the following example an hierarchical array is created:

$dir = '.';

$dirit = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($dir);
$it = new RecursiveIteratorIterator($dirit);
$array = array();
foreach($it as $file)
{
    $path = substr($file, strlen($dir)+1);
    $parts = explode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $path);
    $filename = array_pop($parts);
    $dirname = implode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $parts);
    $build = &$array;
    foreach($parts as $part)
    {
        if (!isset($build[$part])) $build[$part] = array();
        $build = &$build[$part];
    }
    $build[] = $filename;
    unset($build);
}

$array will then contain the listing:

Array
(
    [0] => .buildpath
    [1] => .project
    [.settings] => Array
        (
            [0] => org.eclipse.php.core.prefs
        )

    [array] => Array
        (
            [0] => array-keys.php
            [1] => array-stringkey-explode.php
        )
)

Using json_encode^­Docs can simple turn this into something like:

json_encode($array);

{"0":".buildpath","1":".project",".settings":["org.eclipse.php.core.prefs"],"array":["array-keys.php","array-stringkey-e
xplode.php"]}

As I’ve written in a comment above, glob can be useful, too.