How to delete a folder and all its contents in php

Deleting files and folders in PHP is easy, but if you want to delete an entire folder and all its contents, you will need to spend some time and effort writing code.

PHP provides some functions to handle file and folder operations, the most commonly used of which are the "rmdir()" and "unlink()" functions. The "rmdir()" function is used to delete an empty folder. If the folder contains files or other folders, an error will be thrown. The "unlink()" function is used to delete a file and throws an error if the file does not exist.

Now, we need to delete a non-empty folder and delete all its contents. There are two ways to achieve this goal.

Method 1: Recursively delete a folder and all its contents

The idea of ​​recursively deleting a folder is to first traverse all subfolders and files in the folder, The function is then called recursively until all files and folders are deleted. Here is an example:

function delete_directory($dir) {
    if (!file_exists($dir)) {
        return true;
    }
    if (!is_dir($dir)) {
        return unlink($dir);
    }
    foreach (scandir($dir) as $item) {
        if ($item == '.' || $item == '..') {
            continue;
        }
        if (!delete_directory($dir . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $item)) {
            return false;
        }
    }
    return rmdir($dir);
}

Explain the code of this function:

• Returns true if the folder does not exist.
• If the target is a file rather than a folder, use the unlink() function to delete the file.
• Traverse all files and folders in the target folder, and return false if the file or folder fails to be deleted during the recursive process.
• If all files and folders have been deleted, delete the target folder.

Note that this method deletes all content, including empty folders under the folder, even if you don’t want to delete empty folders.

Method 2: Use the standard library file system class to delete the folder and its contents

Another method is to use the "RecursiveDirectoryIterator" and "RecursiveIteratorIterator" in the PHP standard library " classes that make it easy to delete a folder and all its contents.

function delete_directory($dir) {
    $it = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($dir, RecursiveDirectoryIterator::SKIP_DOTS);
    $files = new RecursiveIteratorIterator($it,
                 RecursiveIteratorIterator::CHILD_FIRST);
    foreach($files as $file) {
        if ($file->isDir()){
            rmdir($file->getRealPath());
        } else {
            unlink($file->getRealPath());
        }
    }
    rmdir($dir);
}

Similarly, this function uses recursion, but it uses the RecursiveDirectoryIterator class and RecursiveIteratorIterator class in the PHP standard library to recursively traverse all files and folders in the folder. The first parameter is the folder path, and the second parameter is an option, which means skipping the folders "." and "..". If a folder is encountered during the traversal, the rmdir() function is used to delete the folder. If a file is encountered, the unlink() function is used to delete the file.

Summary

There are two ways to delete a folder and all its contents in PHP: recursive deletion and using the standard library file system classes. Which method you choose depends on your needs and personal preferences. One thing to note when using recursive functions is that you need to make sure that all folders have been deleted, otherwise it may cause unnecessary problems. When using the standard library filesystem classes, you need to use the appropriate options to skip the "." and ".." folders, and you need to pass the folder path to the function.

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