PHP FTP recursive directory listing

Question

I\'m trying to make a recursive function to get all the directories and sub directories from my ftp server in an array.

I tried a lot of functions I\'ve found on the

Answer 1

If your server supports MLSD command and you have PHP 7.2 or newer, you can use ftp_mlsd function:

function ftp_mlsd_recursive($ftp_stream, $directory)
{
    $result = [];

    $files = ftp_mlsd($ftp_stream, $directory);
    if ($files === false)
    {
        die("Cannot list $directory");
    }

    foreach ($files as $file)
    { 
        $name = $file["name"];
        $filepath = $directory . "/" . $name;
        if (($file["type"] == "cdir") || ($file["type"] == "pdir"))
        {
            // noop
        }
        else if ($file["type"] == "dir")
        {
            $result = array_merge($result, ftp_mlsd_recursive($ftp_stream, $filepath));
        }
        else
        {
            $result[] = $filepath;
        }
    } 
    return $result;
} 

If you do not have PHP 7.2, you can try to implement the MLSD command on your own. For a start, see user comment of the ftp_rawlist command:
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ftp-rawlist.php#101071

---

If you cannot use MLSD, you will particularly have problems telling if an entry is a file or folder. While you can use the ftp_size trick, calling ftp_size for each entry can take ages.

But if you need to work against one specific FTP server only, you can use ftp_rawlist to retrieve a file listing in a platform-specific format and parse that.

The following code assumes a common *nix format.

function ftp_nlst_recursive($ftp_stream, $directory)
{
    $result = [];

    $lines = ftp_rawlist($ftp_stream, $directory);
    if ($lines === false)
    {
        die("Cannot list $directory");
    }

    foreach ($lines as $line)
    {
        $tokens = preg_split("/\s+/", $line, 9);
        $name = $tokens[8];
        $type = $tokens[0][0];
        $filepath = $directory . "/" . $name;

        if ($type == 'd')
        {
            $result = array_merge($result, ftp_nlst_recursive($ftp_stream, $filepath));
        }
        else
        {
            $result[] = $filepath;
        }
    }
    return $result;
}

For DOS format, see: Get directory structure from FTP using PHP.