PHP Case Insensitive Version of file_exists()

Question

I\'m trying to think of the fastest way to implement a case insensitive file_exists function in PHP. Is my best bet to enumerate the file in the directory and do a strtolowe

Answer 1

In Unix file names are case sensitive, so you won't be able to do a case insensitive existence check without listing the contents of the directory.

Answer 2

I used the source from the comments to create this function. Returns the full path file if found, FALSE if not.

Does not work case-insensitively on directory names in the filename.

function fileExists($fileName, $caseSensitive = true) {

    if(file_exists($fileName)) {
        return $fileName;
    }
    if($caseSensitive) return false;

    // Handle case insensitive requests            
    $directoryName = dirname($fileName);
    $fileArray = glob($directoryName . '/*', GLOB_NOSORT);
    $fileNameLowerCase = strtolower($fileName);
    foreach($fileArray as $file) {
        if(strtolower($file) == $fileNameLowerCase) {
            return $file;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

Answer 3

Your approach works.
Alternatively you can use glob to get the list of all files and directories in the present working directory in an array, use array_map to apply strtolower to each element and then use in_array to check if your file(after applying strtolower) exists in the array.

Answer 4

The other answers might be very resource intensive on large file systems (large number of files to search through). It might be useful to create a temporary table of all the filenames (full path if necessary). Then do a like condition search of that table to get whatever the actual case is.

SELECT actual_file_name
FROM TABLE_NAME
WHERE actual_file_name LIKE 'filename_i_want'

Answer 5

This question is a few years old but it is linked to several as duplicates, so here is a simple method.

Returns false if the $filename in any case is not found in the $path or the actual filename of the first file returned by glob() if it was found in any case:

$result = current(preg_grep("/".preg_quote($filename)."/i", glob("$path/*")));

• Get all files in the path glob
• Grep for the $filename in any case i is case-insensitive
• current returns the first filename from the array

Remove the current() to return all matching files. This is important on case-sensitive filesystems as IMAGE.jpg and image.JPG can both exist.

Answer 6

//will resolve & print the real filename
$path = "CaseInsensitiveFiLENAME.eXt";
$dir  = "nameOfDirectory";

if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
 while (false !== ($entry = readdir($handle))) {
     if (strtolower($path) == strtolower($entry)){
       echo $entry ;
    }}
    closedir($handle);
}