PHP: How to search a file using wildcards

Question

I need to read a file in PHP, but I only know the end of the filename, so I need to serch the file in a given directory using wildcards: *filename.wav and then return it to the browser. Is there a function to do that? or I need to get all the files in the directory and then search one by one?

Thanks for all the comments and help.

Answer 1

Take a look at the glob() function

For example if you wanted to get every file matching *abc.xyz in the subdirectory dir

$matches = glob('./dir/*abc.xyz');

Note that glob isn't recursive and will only search a single directory and not all sub directories.

Answer 2

In addition to Yacoby's answer, I would like to add that a new GlobIterator class has been added to PHP >= 5.3.

It allows one to use wildcards, the same way as glob() does -- but, in additional :

• Tt implements the Iterator interface
• You can have it work returning instance of the SplFileInfo class

So many useful things in the SPL (Standard PHP Library), and no-one ever thinking about them... I couldn't resist.