How can I read the directory contents on a remote server with PHP?

Question

I have a url, http://www.mysite.com/images and the images directory allows Directory Listings. How can I get the files in that directory with PHP?

Answer 1

Here is an example if you need to read the images over HTTP and the server is Apache:

<?php
$url = 'http://www.mysite.com/images';

$html = file_get_contents($url);

$count = preg_match_all('/<td><a href="([^"]+)">[^<]*<\/a><\/td>/i', $html, $files);

for ($i = 0; $i < $count; ++$i) {
    echo "File: " . $files[1][$i] . "<br />\n";
}

?>

If it is the same server you are running your PHP on, you can use opendir() and readdir().

Answer 2

I know this question is very old, but just to get me into the swing of using this forum I thought I'd add my view. I found the following happened (referring to the original answer to use regex.

My html turned out to be formatted like this:

<td>
<a href="bricks.php">bricks.php</a>
</td>

So I ended up using this:

$count = preg_match_all('/<a href=\"([^\"?\/]+)">[^<]*<\/a>/i', $html, $files);

I wanted to use the following (which tested ok in the online generator testers, but it failed to find a match in the php code):

$count = preg_match_all('/<td>(?:[\w\n\f])<a href="([^"]+)">[^<]*<\/a>(?:[\w\n\f])<\/td>/i', $html, $files);

Answer 3

You need FTP access (an FTP account to that URL). If you have this, then you can log into the server with FTP and use:

opendir()

and

readdir()

to accomplish what you are trying to do.

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If you do not have access to the server, you will need to scrape the site's HTML, and it gets more complex -> so I can let somebody else tackle that one... but google search "scrape html site" or something similar, there are plenty of pre-written functions that can do similar things.

i.e. http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/web-scrape-with-php-tutorial

http://www.bradino.com/php/screen-scraping/