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.
Answer
You're looking for the glob() function.
file_exists doesn't do any kind of search : it only allows one to know whether a fle exists or not, when knowingf its name.
And, with PHP >= 5.3, you could use the new GlobIterator.
As an example with glob(), the following portion of code :
$list = glob('temp*.php');
var_dump($list);
Gives me this output :
array
0 => string 'temp-2.php' (length=10)
1 => string 'temp.php' (length=8)
While this one :
$list = glob('te*-*');
var_dump($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)