checking if directory contains filetype?

[stephdumais]

Hi, I cant find any simple way to verify if a directory contains a certain file type (by extension)

Basicaly what I want goes as follows:

if (directory contains *.mov) {
some stuff...
} else {
different stuff...
}

I could read the directory into an array, then filter through it but I was wondering if there was a simple function to do this?

[leatherback]

Hi,

This will return an array with filesnames with $extantion in $directory

function getbyextention($directory, $ext)
  {
  $extention = $ext; // from config.php
  $dirpath = $directory;
  $testExt = "\.".$extention."$";
  $i = 0;

  //******** end of var declaration ********

  $dir = opendir($dirpath);  // create directory handle

  while (false !== ($file = readdir($dir))) 
    {
    if (eregi($testExt, $file))
      {
      $maxlen = strlen($file)-4;
      $readinglist[$i] = substr($file, 0, $maxlen);
      //echo $readinglist[$i];
      $i++;
      }
    }
  closedir($dir);
  return $readinglist;
  }

[HalfaBee]

If you are on a unix host try

$number_of_files = exec ( 'ls *.mov | grep -c ".mov"' ) ;

It returns the number of files with that extention.
HalfaBee

[stephdumais]

I'll try the first solution but regarding the second one, I've never used Unix commands directly in PHP like this before. I am hosted on Unix but I'm quite unfamiliar with it's syntax.
In this example, how would I specify the directory?

Thanks for the help so far, guys...

[HalfaBee]

You can put the dir in front of the * in the ls line

ls /home/john/html/*.mov

or relative ./movies/*.mov

HalfaBee

[stephdumais]

Ok the command line solution doesnt seem to work with what I'm doing and the first solution suggested by Leatherback actually takes more code than the array solution I wanted to avoid, so I just went with an array and filter method.
Thanks anyway guys...