Question

I want to store a path (pointing to a directory) in a text file and open the path when required in PHP. Here’s what I have done, which is quite simple but doesn’t really work.

$dir = file_get_contents('./dir_file');
$dir_content = get_fname($dir);

function get_fname($dir) {
    $dirhandle = opendir($dir);
    if (!dirhandle) { exit; }
    .........
}

The value of $dir is what it is in the text file. The code doesn’t work. The function exits in the if statement.

I tried to replace the first line with

$dir = '/home/user/work'; //which is the path stored in the text file.

It works. So I suspect it’s the problem of opendir. I can’t figure out what causes this problem.

Any help will be appreciated. Many thanks.

Answer 1

Check if the file you’re reading from has any line breaks, spaces, etc… after the actual path part. If you pass those in to opendir, it’s going to look for a directory which has those literal characters in it, and most likely fail.

Adding a trim() call may help:

$dir = trim(file_get_contents('./dir_file'));

which will remove any such whitespace characters.