Question

I’m trying to create a drop down menu that points to a directory and populates a drop down menu with the names of certain files in that directory using PHP.

Here’s what I’m working with:

<?php

$path = "pages/"; //change this if the script is in a different dir that the files you want
$show = array( '.php', '.html' ); //Type of files to show

$select = "<select name=\"content\" id=\"content\">";

$dh = @opendir( $path );

while( false !== ( $file = readdir( $dh ) ) ){
    $ext=substr($file,-4,4);
        if(in_array( $ext, $show )){       
            $select .= "<option value='$path/$file'>$file</option>\n";
    }
}  

$select .= "</select>";
closedir( $dh );

echo "$select";
?> 

This bit of code is giving me an errors, and I’m not even really attached to it if there’s a better way of trying to accomplish what I’m trying to do.

Answer 1

It would be easier to use glob() because it can handle wildcards.

// match all files that have either .html or .php extension
$file_matcher = realpath(dirname(__FILE__)) . '/../pages/*.{php,html}';

foreach( glob($file_matcher, GLOB_BRACE) as $file ) {
  $file_name = basename($file);
  $select .= "<option value='$file'>$file_name</option>\n";
}