I came across this snippet today on the PHP manual page.. The page was actually about a function called scandir() which lists all files in a directory. This is of interest as I have always used the old school opendir() system to achieve this. The point however was that browsing the comments, I noticed this.

 
<?php 
// This is a function to count the number of files of a directory
function countFiles($dir){ 
    $files = array(); 
    $directory = opendir($dir); 
    while($item = readdir($directory)){ 
    // We filter the elements that we don't want to appear ".", ".." and ".svn" 
         if(($item != ".") && ($item != "..") && ($item != ".svn") ){ 
              $files[] = $item; 
         } 
    } 
    $numFiles = count($files); 
    return $numFiles; 
} 
?>
 

It made me chuckle. I remember writing massive amounts of code like this. I’m not laughing at the coder, but more at the huge amount of code to produce not a lot. Also the complete neglect for memory consumption by populating an array with every item in a directory. Doesn’t seem bad until you have 30,000 files in a dir and it starts to get noticed.

Anyway, putting my money where my mouth is, I wrote this in a few minutes (Yep, it leverages the axact function this all started with).

 
<?php
 
function countFiles($dir = string)
{
        $count = 0;
        foreach(scandir($dir) as $file)
                if(!in_array($file, array('.','..','.svn')))
                        $count++;
        return $count;
}
 

My code;

• Doesn’t fill an array for no reason
• Doesn’t check for each $item, one after another
• Doesn’t count the array.
• Doesn’t pass the counted value to an obsolete variable.

Love to hear your thoughts.