scan a dir and sort last n items by date?

[Lars_P]

 

Hi

 

I'm kind of new to this so please be gentle...

 

I've got hold of a php script which scans a directory on my server looking for mpeg's. When/if it finds some we do this:

 

 

// read through the directory and filter files to an array

@$d = dir($directory);
if ($d) { 
while($entry=$d->read()) {  
	$ps = strpos(strtolower($entry), $filter);
	if (!($ps === false)) {  
		$items[] = $entry; 
	} 
}
$d->close();
sort($items);
}

 

 

.... it then returns me an xpsf-formatted playlist, which is what I'm trying to achieve.

 

 

My questions: how do I modify the scan and sort to return only the last "n" items uploaded to the folder by date?

 

Then I throw in a dozen new items and bingo, I have a new 12-item playlist.

 

I'd then like to create sorts with offsets: eg the previous n tunes before the last n, so people can get this month's dozen, last month's dozen, etc.

 

Thanks for your help!

 

Lars

[Psycho]

The difficulty here is that without saving the list of files to a database to keep track of when things were added it is difficult to know when something was added. The only option I could think of was to sort them by the last modified date.

 

I decided to go with the glob() function which returns an array of files that match a pattern. If you have several types of 'patterns' you may be able to use mutiple patterns in the functions, not sure though. If not, I would just create a function that takes a list of patterns and run through the list recursively to create the list before sorting.

<?php

$directory = ".";

foreach (glob("$directory/*.mpg") as $filename) {
   //Create an array with the last modified date as the index
   $fileArray[filemtime($filename)] = $filename;
}

//Sort the array (in reverse) by the index (last mod date, newest first)
krsort($fileArray);

//Reduce the array to $n items
$n = 12;
$fileArray = array_slice($fileArray, 0, $n);

?>