Question

its a mystery to me why this is happening. so here is the code:

$dir = 'test/';
$de = opendir($dir);
if ($de) {
    while (($file = readdir($de)) !== false) {
        $path = $dir . $file;
        $file_title = 'this text gets repeated three times, each followed by a dot' . $file;
        echo $file;
    }
} else {
    echo "invalid directory";
}

so If $file= video.mp4 and $file_title=’file name’.$file; it would look like this:

‘file name.file name.file namevideo.mp4’ and if there were no string before the variable, ie $file_title=$title there would be three dots before the variable like this: …video.mp4

if anyone has any idea what’s happening please let me know. Thanks.

Answer 1

You are listing the . and .. directories, use is_file() to check so the entry is really a file and not a directory:

if (is_file($dir . $file)) {
   // entry is a file
}

Here you can read more about the dot directories: There’s a lot in the dot