PHP readdir( ) returns " . " and " .. " entries

Question

I'm coding a simple web report system for my company. I wrote a script for index.php that gets a list of files in the "reports" directory and creates a link to that report automatically. It works fine, but my problem here is that readdir( ) keeps returning the . and .. directory pointers in addition to the directory's contents. Is there any way to prevent this OTHER THAN looping through the returned array and stripping them manually?

Here is the relevant code for the curious:

//Open the "reports" directory
$reportDir = opendir('reports');

//Loop through each file
while (false !== ($report = readdir($reportDir)))
{
  //Convert the filename to a proper title format
  $reportTitle = str_replace(array('_', '.php'), array(' ', ''), $report);
  $reportTitle = strtolower($reportTitle);
  $reportTitle = ucwords($reportTitle);

  //Output link
  echo "<a href=\"viewreport.php?" . $report . "\">$reportTitle</a><br />";
}

//Close the directory
closedir($reportDir);

Answer 1

In your above code, you could append as a first line in the while loop:

if ($report == '.' or $report == '..') continue;