How to automatically read contents of a folder?

DboG

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, but I couldn't find a solution by searching.

My company has a folder on their site that contains a number of text files, each containing data (one line each). My boss needs me to cull this data into a single file. The problem is that there are well over 1000 of these files, each with a filename of "user<username>.txt". Clearly it would be a pain to lift this data manually, so I'm looking for a script that will open each file, take its line of data, then add it to one central data sheet.

Any information on this would be appreciated. I'm pretty comfortable with reading from and writing to files, it's the automatically going through all the files that's stumping me.

Thanks!

laserlight

Check out the directory handling functions, e.g. [man]dir/man, [man]opendir/man.

DboG

I should then be able to loop readdir() and pull the data file by file, right? Excellent, thank you!

DboG

Okay, I tried to implement it, but with no luck. I set up the following code:

<?php
$qtype = 0;
$writefile = "namelist.txt";
if ($handle = opendir('data')) {
   while (false !== ($datafile = readdir($handle))) {
       if ($datafile != "." && $datafile != "..") {
		   echo "$datafile<br>";
		   $file_handle = fopen($writefile,"a+");
		   $file_line = file($datafile);
		   $filedata = $file_line[0];
		   if (fwrite($writefile, $filedata) === FALSE) {
       		echo "Cannot write to file ($writefile)";
       		exit;
   	   }
           echo "Success, wrote ($filedata) to file ($writefile)";
           fclose($file_handle);
       } else {
           echo "The file $writefile is not writable. ";
       }

   }
   closedir($handle);
}
?>

With 'data' being the folder containing the numerous text files I'm trying to read, and 'namelist.txt' being the text file I'm trying to write all that data to, line by line. In running the script, though I get two lines of "The file namelist.txt is not writable. " and then several lines reading in the format of "userjohndoe.txt Success, wrote () to file (namelist.txt)".

But then it stops short, and nothing is actually written to the namelist.txt. It looks like it's not successfully pulling the data from the text files. What am I missing?

Thanks.

johnnyv

This isn't php but if you happen to be using linux/bsd/unix you can do this easily with a single command.
shell command: "cat .txt > namelist.txt"

This will read the contents of all .txt files in the current directory and place them into a file.

DboG

Unfortunately, don't have shell access...

johnnyv

So you can't use exec()?

<?php
exec("cat /var/data/*.txt > namelist.txt");
?>

DboG

I don't believe so. Running the script you provided doesn't give an error message, but it also doesn't seem to do anything.

ryneaux

this won't create the new file, but it should display all contents of those files within the page. You can then select all, copy, and paste it into a new document.

<?php
$dirpath="/path/to/the/directory/";
if ($handle = opendir($dirpath)) {
     while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))){
          if (eregi(".txt",$file)){
               $thefile=$dirpath.$file;
               $openfile=fopen($thefile,'r');
               $filecontents = fread($openfile, filesize ($thefile));
               fclose($openfile);
               $allcontents.=$filecontents;
          }
     }
     closedir($handle);
}
echo $allcontents;
?>

DboG

That worked great, thanks!