Where does "." (dot) come from when using PHP ´scandir´

Question

I'm a bit confused.
I'm building a PHP function to loop out images in a specified dir.

PHP

$dir = "bilder/".$objekt[0]['objekt_nr']."/thumbnail/";
$thumbnails = scandir($dir);

print_r($thumbnails);

foreach ($thumbnails as $value) {
   echo "<img src='".$dir.$value. "'>";
}

array

(
[0] => .
[1] => ..
[2] => bjornc.jpg
[3] => test_bild3.jpg
)

HTML

<img src='bilder/22159/thumbnail/.'>
<img src='bilder/22159/thumbnail/..'>
<img src='bilder/22159/thumbnail/bjornc.jpg'>
<img src='bilder/22159/thumbnail/test_bild3.jpg'>

How can i get rid of theese dots?
I guess it´s the directorie dots..

UPDATE

The most easy way was found in php.net manual

$thumbnails = array_diff(scandir($dir), array('..', '.'));

Answer 1

The dot directory is the current directory. Dot-dot is the parent directory.

If you want to create a list of files in a directory you should really skip those two, or really any directory starting with a leading dot (on POSIX systems like Linux and OSX those are supposed to be hidden directories).

You can do that by simply check if the first character in the file name is a dot, and if it is just skip it (i.e. you continue the loop).

Answer 2

You can skip it by using in_array as

foreach ($thumbnails as $value) {
    if (!in_array($value, array(".", ".."))) {
        echo "<img src='" . $dir . $value . "'>";
    }
}