Question

Salutations, Elders of code,

I am on a quest to master the spells of PHP, and now need your assistance in slaying a mighty beast.

I’m making a REST API in PHP. One of the functions is a GET that returns a list of pngs in a dir. But instead of returning one array, it returns multiple arrays (one for each iteration?).

I want:

["1.png","2.png","3.png"]

But I’m getting:

["1.png"]["1.png","2.png"]["1.png","2.png","3.png"]

I present my pitiful function for scorn and humiliation:

function getPics() {
$pic_array = Array(); 
$handle =    opendir('/srv/dir/pics'); 
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) { 
    if ($file!= "." && $file!= ".." &&!is_dir($file)) { 
    $namearr = explode('.',$file); 
    if ($namearr[count($namearr)-1] == 'png') $pic_array[] = $file; 
    } 
echo json_encode($pic_array);
} 
closedir($handle);
}

Answer 1

You should do some proper indenting and it will be very clear what was wrong. You put the echo json_encode() in the loop. This is a corrected version:

function getPics()
{
    $pic_array = Array(); 
    $handle = opendir('/srv/dir/pics'); 
    while ( false !== ($file = readdir($handle)) )
    {
        if ( $file=="." || $file==".." || is_dir($file) ) continue; 
        $namearr = explode('.',$file);
        if ($namearr[count($namearr)-1] == 'png') $pic_array[] = $file; 
    } 
    echo json_encode($pic_array);
    closedir($handle);
}

Note that this way of checking the extension fails has a minor flaw, in that a file named “png” (with no extension) will match. There are several ways to fix this, e.g. by using pathinfo() to analyse the filename.

ps. also not that this:

if ( $file=="." || $file==".." || is_dir($file) ) continue; 

can be written as

if ( is_dir($file) ) continue;