Sorting results of "readfile?"

Justanoob

Hi, everyone. This is my first post and I'm hoping that someone here can help. I'm new to PHP and I'm very close to completing a small project.

<?php

echo "<center>";
echo "<font size=\"5\" color=\"#000000\" face=\"times new roman\"><b>Page Title</b></font>";
echo "</center>";
echo "<center>";
echo "<font size=\"8\" color=\"#000000\" face=\"times new roman\"><b>Bid Requests</b></font>";

echo "<BR>";
echo "<BR>";

$extension = '.txt';
$blank = '';

echo "<font size=\"3\" color=\"#000000\" face=\"arial\">The following bid requests are open at this time:</font>";
echo "<BR>";
echo "<BR>";
echo "<font size=\"3\" color=\"#000000\" face=\"arial\">";
if ($handle = opendir('./bidfolder/')) {
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
if ($file != "." && $file != "..") 

{
echo "<center>";
echo "<b>";

echo htmlspecialchars(ucfirst(preg_replace('/\..*$/', '', $file)));

echo "</b>";
echo "<BR><BR>";

readfile('./bidfolder/' . $file);

echo "<BR><BR>";
echo "<img src='http://www.website.com/images/bidbar.jpg'>";
echo "<BR>";
echo "<BR>";
echo "</center>";
}
}
closedir($handle);
echo "</font>";
}
?>

This code does what I want; it displays the name (minus .txt extension) and contents of text files in a particular folder. But....I need it to sort by date/time with the newest files on top.

Is there an easy way to do this?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

devinemke

$path = './bidfolder/';
$handle = opendir($path);
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle)))
{
	if ($file != '.' && $file != '..')
	{
		$filemtime = filemtime($path . $file);
		$file_array[$file] = $filemtime;
	}
}

asort($file_array);

foreach ($file_array as $key => $value)
{
	echo $key . '<br><br>';
	readfile($path . $key);
}

you should really consider using a database

bradgrafelman

Justanoob wrote:
it displays the name (minus .txt extension)

A job for [man]pathinfo/man rather than a preg function, most likely.

As for sorting by modified time, see this user contributed note on the glob() manual page.

EDIT:

devinemke wrote:
you should really consider using a database

I definitely agree. For example, if two (or more) files have the same modified time (e.g. due to an FTP upload where the FTP server or client doesn't support/allow the changing of the file timestamps, or for any other reason) the above code snippet will be missing some files.

Justanoob

bradgrafelman wrote:
A job for [man]pathinfo/man rather than a preg function, most likely.

Thanks, guys. The above code works (with a slight bit of tweaking). I just looked at [man]pathinfo[/man] and it looks like either that or [man]basename[/man] would do the trick of suppressing the ".txt" like the preg function did.
I'm still almost a beginner to PHP and I can't figure out how to incorporate either of these functions into the above code by Devinemke.

How would I go about this?

bradgrafelman

Basically, his code is doing the opposite of what I thought it was doing at a glance; he's building an array of filenames and their modified times. The keys of the array are the file names, so when he echo's out $key in the foreach() loop, you get the filename.

Therefore, instead of simply echo'ing $key, use one of those functions to strip off the extension.