How to List Specific Files in a PHP Directory Using glob()?

Listing Specific Files in a PHP Directory

In a previous article, we explored how to list all files in a directory using PHP. While this code is straightforward, it may not always be suitable when you need to filter and display specific files.

Listing Files with a Specific Extension

To list only files with a particular file extension (such as ".xml"), we can utilize PHP's glob() function. This function takes a pattern as an argument and returns an array of filenames that match the specified pattern.

Usage

The following code snippet demonstrates how to list XML files in a directory:

$files = glob('/path/to/dir/*.xml');
foreach ($files as $file) {
    echo $file . PHP_EOL;
}

In this code:

• glob() scans the specified directory and returns an array of filenames matching the pattern "*.xml".
• We iterate over the returned array using a foreach loop and print each filename.

Additional Notes

• The pattern used in glob() can include wildcards (? and *) to match multiple characters.
• The pattern can also be used to specify full paths using forward slashes (/) as directory separators.
• This method is more efficient than filtering the list of all files after retrieval, as it only retrieves matching files from the file system.

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