accessing several directories - recurssi

[jasongonella]

Hello,

I have created a script/function that checks all the files in a specified directory for HTML comment tags and if it finds any, it removes the HTML comments and copies everything from the directory into a new directory. Therefore, we end up with 2 directories. 1 with files containing HTML comments and the other with files that have had the comments removed.

The point of all of this is security. We don’t want the user to see the HTML comments, however the developer’s need them, to assist with structured programming.

This function works just fine, however I’d now like to increase the scope of the function so that it will remove the comments from all files below the directory. At the moment it just goes through one directory and if it encounters another directory it won’t go through that directory as well.

So my question is:

How can I ensure that I will cover every file of every directory. Is there a special order that it needs to be done in. I.e. do I need to go to the bottom of the directory and work my way up? Do I need to map the path when changing directories? Do I need to use recursion. Basically, I’m not sure how to approach this!!!!

I’d be very grateful if you could help…..

Regards,

Jason

[kryptx]

My suggestion would be this.

First, make the copies. We don't need to be accidentally removing valuable comments from files permanently.

As for the function... write one which first runs itself on each subdirectory (any order is fine; alphabetically is as good as anything), then removes comments from every file in the current folder. Run this function on the top level... and you're clean.

[kryptx]

okay, that was a bit unclear. You want something to this effect:

function foo( $path ) { // our recursive function

$handle = opendir($path); //open the directory

while($file = readdir($handle)) {
if(is_dir($file) && ($file != '.') && ($file != '..')) { // if it's a directory...

foo($file); // run this function on it

} else {

// insert your code to strip tags here

}

}

[smarlowe]

If you need to recurse directories, take a look at this code:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=204

[jasongonella]

Cheers guys......