Limit an array to X number of items (not SQL query)

[jacy]

Several years ago I got help here with the script below, which reads the files in a directory stored as YYYYMMDD.pdf and returns an HTML list.

Works great, but I need to modify this to limit the HTML list to only the 5 most recent files in the directory.

I tried playing with explode and that's not it.

<ul style="padding-left: 30px;">
<?
$the_array = Array();
$handle = opendir('images/stories/bulletins/2011/.');
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
   if ($file != "." && $file != ".." && $file != "index.html") {
   $the_array[] = $file;
   }
}
closedir($handle);
sort ($the_array);
reset ($the_array);
// leave the beginning of the script like you had before - get an array of filenames 
foreach($the_array as $val) { 
// this is the part you should change: 
    $filesplit = explode('.', $val); 
    $timestamp = strtotime($filesplit[0]); 
    $list = date('F j, Y',$timestamp); 
    echo "<li><a href=images/stories/bulletins/2011/$val>$list</a></li>"; 
}
 ?>
</ul>

Thanks for any pointers!

[Bonesnap]

You can do it a couple of different ways. The first one that came to mind is after adding the file to the array, check how long the array is. If it's 5, exit the loop.

while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
   if ($file != "." && $file != ".." && $file != "index.html") {
   $the_array[] = $file;
   if(count($the_array) == 5)
       break;
   }
}

[NogDog]

Another option (not better, just different) is to use [man]array_slice[/man] to essentially truncate the array. After you do the sort() but before the foreach() loop, simply do:

$the_array = array_slice($the_array, 0, 5);