glob

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

glob — Find pathnames matching a pattern

Description

glob(string $pattern, int $flags = 0): array|false

The glob() function searches for all the pathnames matching pattern according to the rules used by the libc glob() function, which is similar to the rules used by common shells.

Parameters

pattern

The pattern. No tilde expansion or parameter substitution is done.

Special characters:

  • * - Matches zero or more characters.
  • ? - Matches exactly one character (any character).
  • [...] - Matches one character from a group of characters. If the first character is !, matches any character not in the group.
  • \ - Escapes the following character, except when the GLOB_NOESCAPE flag is used.

flags

Valid flags:

  • GLOB_MARK - Adds a slash (a backslash on Windows) to each directory returned
  • GLOB_NOSORT - Return files as they appear in the directory (no sorting). When this flag is not used, the pathnames are sorted alphabetically
  • GLOB_NOCHECK - Return the search pattern if no files matching it were found
  • GLOB_NOESCAPE - Backslashes do not quote metacharacters
  • GLOB_BRACE - Expands {a,b,c} to match 'a', 'b', or 'c'
  • GLOB_ONLYDIR - Return only directory entries which match the pattern
  • GLOB_ERR - Stop on read errors (like unreadable directories), by default errors are ignored.

Note: The GLOB_BRACE flag is not available on some non GNU systems, like Solaris or Alpine Linux.

Return Values

Returns an array containing the matched files/directories, an empty array if no file matched or false on error.

Note:

On some systems it is impossible to distinguish between empty match and an error.

Examples

Example #1 Convenient way how glob() can replace opendir() and friends.

<?php
foreach (glob("*.txt") as $filename) {
    echo "$filename size " . filesize($filename) . "\n";
}
?>

The above example will output something similar to:

funclist.txt size 44686
funcsummary.txt size 267625
quickref.txt size 137820

Notes

Note: This function will not work on remote files as the file to be examined must be accessible via the server's filesystem.

Note: This function isn't available on some systems (e.g. old Sun OS).

See Also