Is there a way to write the PHP file_exists function so that it searches a directory for a file with an arbitrary extension. For instance, suppose I knew that a file were called "hello", but I didn't know the extension, how would I write a function that searched for a file called hello.* and returned the name of this file? As far as I can tell, file_exists will only search for a string.
Thanks.
You're looking for the glob() function.
file_exists doesn't do any kind of search : it only allows one to know whether a file exists or not, when knowing its name.
And, with PHP >= 5.3, you could use the new GlobIterator.
$list = glob('temp*.php');
var_dump($list);
Gives me this output :
array
0 => string 'temp-2.php' (length=10)
1 => string 'temp.php' (length=8)
$list = glob('te*-*');
var_dump($list);
Yes, with two * ;-)
Will give me :
array
0 => string 'temp-2.php' (length=10)
1 => string 'test-1.php' (length=10)
2 => string 'test-curl.php' (length=13)
3 => string 'test-phing-1' (length=12)
4 => string 'test-phpdoc' (length=11)
*; single characters (?) and classes ([abc]) to name a few can also be put to good use in glob patterns.
As of PHP5.3, you can also use the GlobIterator to search a directory with wildcards:
$it = iterator_to_array(
new GlobIterator('/some/path/*.pdf', GlobIterator::CURRENT_AS_PATHNAME) );
would return the full paths to all .pdf files in some/path in an array. The above performs about the same as glob(), but iterators provide a more powerful and extensible API.
As long as file_exists returns a BOOLEAN I wrote this small function that accepts a search string with * to look for files... Example:
searchForFile("temp*");
function searchForFile($fileToSearchFor){
$numberOfFiles = count(glob($fileToSearchFor));
return ($numberOfFiles > 0);
}
If you need a little more control and are on pre PHP 5.3 you could use a DirectoryIterator or RecursiveDirectoryIterator. Both have a lot of great function for added control and manipulation.
PHP docs are at DirectoryIterator and RecursiveDirectoryIterator
You can use fnmatch to match one filename against a pattern. Use this in a loop over all files.
if (fnmatch("hello*", $filename)) {
echo 'true';
}
