Talk In Code

The following function will rename all of the image files in a directory to be sequential. The parameters are the path of the directory that the files are in and the name of a function that will be used to sort the array of files through the PHP usort() funciton.

function sequentialImages($path, $sort=false) {
 $i = 1;
 $files = glob($path."/{*.gif,*.jpg,*.jpeg,*.png}",GLOB_BRACE|GLOB_NOSORT);
 
 if ( $sort !== false ) {
  usort($files, $sort);
 }
 
 $count = count($files);
 foreach ( $files as $file ) {
  $newname = str_pad($i, strlen($count)+1, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT);
  $ext = substr(strrchr($file, '.'), 1);
  $newname = $path.'/'.$newname.'.'.$ext;
  if ( $file != $newname ) {
   rename($file, $newname);
  }
  $i++;
 }
}

The following function can be used in the second parameter to sort the files by their last modified time.

function sort_by_mtime($file1, $file2) {
 $time1 = filemtime($file1);
 $time2 = filemtime($file2);
 if ( $time1 == $time2 ) {
  return 0;
 }
 return ($time1 < $time2) ? 1 : -1;
}

Putting these two function together we can call the sequentialImages() function like this.

sequentialImages('files','sort_by_mtime');

This function takes the following set of images:

file1.gif
file2.gif
wibble.gif
wobble.gif
02.gif

And renames them to the following:

01.gif
02.gif
03.gif
04.gif
05.gif

After following the last post on deleting files and directories in Phing you might now be wondering if you can create things as well. The answer is yes.

To create a directory with Phing you need to use the mkdir element. The dir attribute is used to give the name of the directory to be created. The following example will create a directory called myProject_build in the current working directory (ie. where you are running phing from).

<mkdir dir="myProject_build" />

That is about as complicated as the mkdir element gets, although you can also pass a parameter to the dir attribute.

<mkdir dir="${projectDirectory}" />

To create a file with Phing you need to use the touch element. The file attribute is used to give the name of the file being created.

<touch file="README.txt" />

You can optionally include one of two date attributes in the touch element. This are datetime (as a date string) and millis (as an integer timestamp) which set the creation timestamp of the file. If you don’t include either of these attributes then the current time stamp (ie. now) will be used instead.

Although using Phing is mainly about copying files, you might also need to delete directories and files using the delete element. Remember that the default behavior of copy command copies files only if the source files are different from the destination files. A prudent approach might be to delete the build directory and then recreate it, ready for Phing to copy files into.

To delete a directory you need to use the dir attribute of the delete element, the delete element also accepts the file attribute to delete specific files. The following target will delete the directory myProject_build.

<target name="prepare">
<delete dir="myProject_build" />
</target>

The delete element can also accept a fileset element, which will delete multiple files. the following code will delete any php file from the myProject_build folder and from a sub folder called app.

<fileset dir="./" id="deleteFiles">
 <include name="myProject_build/*.php" />
 <include name="myProject_build/app/*.php" />
</fileset>
 
<target name="prepare">
  <delete>
    <fileset refid="deleteFiles" />
  </delete>
</target>

Remember when doing this to remove any dir or file attributes from the delete element as they can interfere with your fileset. Also, if you use a fileset be careful not to use the same fileset that copies the files into the build directory as the only thing you will accomplish is the deletion of your application. This is quite easy to do, I even did it whilst testing the previous example!

Sometimes it is necessary to turn off PHP parsing for a directory. You might want to give away some source code and therefore don’t want to parse that code when the user tries to download it.

To turn off PHP parsing in a directory just create a .htaccess file with the following content.

php_flag engine off

You can expand on this by adding the following:

AddType text/plain .php

This will force all files to be served as plain text files.

If you are going to use this then be sure that you do not put this in any directory that contains your applications. This will cause your files to be downloadable, including any files with usernames and passwords in.

I have been asked a couple of times recently if PHP has a function that will move a file, so I thought I would put the solution here.

PHP has a function called rename() which can be used to rename a file, but because of the way it works it can be used to move files. Let’s say that you wanted to rename a file called test.txt to test_back.txt, this can be accomplished by doing the following.

rename("test.txt", "test_back.txt");

However, if you want to move the file from one directory to another you can do the following.

rename("test.txt", "backups/test_back.txt");

The return value of rename() is boolean that tells you if the rename was successful or not, this can be used to error check like this.

if ( !rename("test.txt", "backups/test_back.txt") ) {
 // rename not successful, try another way
}

Be aware that if you try the following:

rename("test.txt", "test.txt");

The function will return true.

To rename a directory you should do the following:

rename("directory/directoryold","directory/directorynew");

Note the absence of the trailing slash on the directory name, PHP will give an error if this slash is added.