Posted by Big Moxy on 12/23/07 22:10

On Dec 23, 1:09 pm, My Pet Programmer <anth...@mypetprogrammer.com>
wrote:
> Big Moxy said:
>
>
>
> > On Dec 23, 11:17 am, My Pet Programmer <anth...@mypetprogrammer.com>
> > wrote:
> >> Big Moxy said:
>
> >>> I have a routine to extract the name and mtime files in a directory.
> >>> PHP by default sorts the array key. I looked at other sort functions
> >>> but don't understand how to sort on a different field.
> >>> Can someone please show me how to sort by the filemtime field instead
> >>> of the filename?
> >>> Thank you!
> >>> Tim
> >>> <TABLE ALIGN=CENTER BGCOLOR=#ffffff CELLPADDING=4 CELLSPACING=0
> >>> border=2>
> >>> <tr><TH>File</TH><TH>Date</TH></TR>
> >>> <?php
> >>>   $dir="./";
> >>>   if (is_dir($dir)) {
> >>>     $dh = @opendir($dir);
> >>>     if($dh) {
> >>>       while (($file = @readdir($dh)) == true) {
> >>>            $pos = strpos($file, '.');
> >>>            if (!$pos === false) {
> >>>            if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
> >>>                    $file_array[] = $file;
> >>>            }
> >>>            }
> >>>       }
> >>>     }
> >>>     sort($file_array);
> >>>     reset($file_array);
> >>>     for($i=0;$i<count($file_array);$i++) {
> >>>            $name=$file_array[$i];
> >>>         $date = date("Y-m-d H:i", filemtime($name));
> >>>         if (!is_dir($name)) {
> >>>            print("<tr><TD>$name</TD><TD>$date</TD></TR>\n");
> >>>         }
> >>>     }
> >>>   }
> >>> ?>
> >>> </TABLE>
> >>http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.asort.php
>
> >> RTM
>
> >> ~A!- Hide quoted text -
>
> >> - Show quoted text -
>
> > The manual may be easy for you to understand but for me the
> > documentation and subsequent discussion is anything but intuitive. It
> > also doesn't help that all of the code samples are not commented.
>
> > Is there someone who can respond with the understanding that I may not
> > be an expert PHP programmer?
>
> My apologies. You are correct in that I assumed you were much more into
> PHP than you are. Comes from spending too much time in the code, I
> think. Ok, so here you go, then:
>
> When you run asort on an array, it sorts the array by value, instead of
> by key. Since you have an array of filenames you want sorted ascending
> (A-Z), you can run this line of code to sort then appropriately:
>
> asort($file_array);
>
> And you don't need to reset the array, your loop looks at them in order,
> so you don't need to worry about the internal array pointer.
>
> Sorry for the mix up.
>
> ~A!- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

Thank you. I have enough general coding experience to understand a lot
of code however I was lost without any comments in the manual
examples. My original code contained sort($file_array) which yielded
ascending results by file name. I want to sort by filemtime (date/time
last modified). It seems to me that I have to create a new array and
load name and filemtime a two-dimensional array. Is that correct?

That leads me to a new question. How do I create and load the new
array? I tried this:

// do I explicitly define the new $file_results array? if so,
how?
//
for($i=0;$i<count($file_array);$i++) {
$name=$file_array[$i];
$date = date("Y-m-d H:i", filemtime($name));
if (!is_dir($name)) {
$file_results[$i]['date'] = $date;
$file_results[$i]['name'] = $name;
}
}

which produces:

Date File
Array['date'] Array['name']
Array['date'] Array['name']
Array['date'] Array['name']
Array['date'] Array['name']
Array['date'] Array['name']

Thanks,
Tim

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