scandir() to sort by date modified

Question

I\'m trying to make scandir(); function go beyond its written limits, I need more than the alpha sorting it currently supports. I need to sort the scandir

Answer 1

This is a great question and Ryon Sherman’s answer provides a solid answer, but I needed a bit more flexibility for my needs so I created this newer function: better_scandir.

The goal is to allow having scandir sorting order flags work as expected; not just the reverse array sort method in Ryon’s answer. And also explicitly setting SORT_NUMERIC for the array sort since those time values are clearly numbers.

Usage is like this; just switch out SCANDIR_SORT_DESCENDING to SCANDIR_SORT_ASCENDING or even leave it empty for default:

better_scandir(, SCANDIR_SORT_DESCENDING);

And here is the function itself:

function better_scandir($dir, $sorting_order = SCANDIR_SORT_ASCENDING) {

  /****************************************************************************/
  // Roll through the scandir values.
  $files = array();
  foreach (scandir($dir, $sorting_order) as $file) {
    if ($file[0] === '.') {
      continue;
    }
    $files[$file] = filemtime($dir . '/' . $file);
  } // foreach

  /****************************************************************************/
  // Sort the files array.
  if ($sorting_order == SCANDIR_SORT_ASCENDING) {
    asort($files, SORT_NUMERIC);
  }
  else {
    arsort($files, SORT_NUMERIC);
  }

  /****************************************************************************/
  // Set the final return value.
  $ret = array_keys($files);

  /****************************************************************************/
  // Return the final value.
  return ($ret) ? $ret : false;

} // better_scandir