counting things and stopping counting things

[filn]

hey all. i need as little more help. heres the situation:

say i have a directory full of files. i know how to read the contents and display the contents, but what i want to know is, how do i display only a certain number of contents ? like if the directory had 100 files but i only want to see the first 12.

once ive seen the first 12, how would i get to see the next 12 ?

or another thing that would do the same thing (i think): how would you devide the total number of items in a directory into equal groups and then say if you had a remainder delete it.

any help, suggestions, comments, ideas are welcome !!

[TRJ]

I hope that the following code is along the right lines.

Basically it reads the directory and places the file names into an array. Then you select a start point (you could do this in the URL) and prints out the names of 12 files. You could read the files themselves instead of simply printing out the names.

To view the next 12. Add a link: page.php?start=$start+12

<?php

$dir_to_open = opendir ("your_dir");
$n = 0;

while ($files = readdir ($dir_to_open)) {
$file_array[$n] = "$files";
$n++;
}

closedir ($dir_to_open);

$number_files = count($file_array);
$start = 0;
$end = $start+11;

if ($end >= $number_files) {
$end = $number_files-1;
}

for ($n=$start; $n<=($end); $n++) {
print "$n: $file_array[$n]<br>";
}

?>

Hope it helps?

Terry