Question

If you scan a folder containing other folders AND files, how do you get rid of . and .. and files? How do you put in array only folders WITHOUT . and ..? I would like to use regular expression, but I’m newbie and I can’t get it right. My code is now this but doesn’t work:

if(fnmatch(‘\.{1,2}’,$dir_array[$i]) || is_file($dir_array[$i]){
unset($dir_array[$i]);
}else{ //other code
}

Answer 1

You are confusing fnmatch and regular expressions in your code. To get all files and directories except the special ones, use this:

$dir_array = array_diff($dir_array, array('.', '..')); 

Alternatively, if you iterate the array anyway, you can test each element like this:

foreach ($dir_array as $name) {     if (($name != '..') && ($name != '.')) {         // Do stuff on all files and directories except . ..         if (is_dir($name)) {             // Do stuff on directories only         }     } } 

In php<5.3, you can exclusively use a callback function, too:

$dir_array = array_filter($dir_array,   create_function('$n', 'return $n != '.' && $n != '..' && is_dir($n);')); 

(See Allain Lalonde’s answer for a more verbose version)

Since php 5.3, this can be written nicer:

$dir_array = array_filter($dir_array,   function($n) {return $n != '.' && $n != '..' && is_dir($n);}); 

Finally, combining array_filter and the first line of code of this answer yields an (insignificantly) slower, but probably more readable version:

$dir_array = array_filter(array_diff($dir_array, array('.', '..')), is_dir);