PHP FTP recursive directory listing

Question

I'm trying to create a recursive function to get all directories and subdirectories from an ftp server in an array.

I tried a lot of features I found online. The one that works best for me is this:

public function getAllSubDirFiles() {
    $dir = array(".");
    $a = count($dir);
    $i = 0;
    $depth = 20;
    $b = 0;
    while (($a != $b) && ($i < $depth)) {
        $i;
        $a = count($dir);
        foreach ($dir as $d) {
            $ftp_dir = $d . "/";
            $newdir = ftp_nlist($this->connectionId, $ftp_dir);
            foreach ($newdir as $key => $x) {

                if ((strpos($x, ".")) || (strpos($x, ".") === 0)) {
                    unset($newdir[$key]);
                } elseif (!in_array($x, $dir)) {
                    $dir[] = $x;
                }
            }
        }
        $b = count($dir);
    }
    return $dir;

}

The problem with this function is that it does not allow directories to have "."Every file located in the root directory will also be considered a directory in its name. So I tweaked the function and got this:

public function getAllSubDirFiles($ip, $id, $pw) {
    $dir = array(".");
    $a = count($dir);
    $i = 0;
    $depth = 20;
    $b =0;
    while (($a != $b) && ($i < $depth)) {
        $i;
        $a = count($dir);
        foreach ($dir as $d) {
            $ftp_dir = $d . "/";
            $newdir = ftp_nlist($this->connectionId, $ftp_dir);
            foreach ($newdir as $key => $x) {
                if (!is_dir('ftp://'.$id.':'.$pw.'@'.$ip.'/'.$x)) {
                    unset($newdir[$key]);
                } elseif (!in_array($x, $dir)) {
                    $dir[] = $x;
                }
            }
        }
        $b = count($dir);
    }
    return $dir;

}

This works fine but gives the results I want. But it's too slow to use.

I also tried using ftp_rawlist but it had the same drawback of being very slow.

public function getAllSubDirFiles() {
    $dir = array(".");
    $a = count($dir);
    $i = 0;
    $depth = 20;
    $b = 0;
    while (($a != $b) && ($i < $depth)) {
        $i;
        $a = count($dir);
        foreach ($dir as $d) {
            $ftp_dir = $d . "/";
            $newdir = $this->getFtp_rawlist('/' . $ftp_dir);
            foreach ($newdir as $key => $x) {

                $firstChar = substr($newdir[$key][0], 0, 1);

                $a = 8;
                    while ($a < count($newdir[$key])) {

                        if ($a == 8) {
                            $fileName = $ftp_dir . '/' . $newdir[$key][$a];
                        } else {
                            $fileName = $fileName . ' ' . $newdir[$key][$a];
                        }
                        $a ;
                    }

                if ($firstChar != 'd') {
                    unset($newdir[$key]);
                } elseif (!in_array($fileName, $dir)) {

                    $dir[] = $fileName;
                }
            }
        }
        $b = count($dir);
    }
    return $dir;
}

public function getFtp_rawlist($dir) {

    $newArr = array();

    $arr = ftp_rawlist($this->connectionId, $dir);

    foreach ($arr as $value) {

        $stringArr = explode(" ", $value);

        $newArr[] = array_values(array_filter($stringArr));
    }
    return $newArr;
}

I have been troubled by this problem for the past few days, and I am getting more and more desperate. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know

Answer 1

I built an OOP FTP client library that can help you solve this problem a lot, using just this code you can retrieve a directory listing with just additional useful information like (chmod, last modification time, size...).

Code:

// Connection
$connection = new FtpConnection("localhost", "foo", "12345");
$connection->open();
        
// FtpConfig
$config = new FtpConfig($connection);
$config->setPassive(true);

$client = new FtpClient($connection);

$allFolders =
    // directory, recursive, filter
    $client->listDirectoryDetails('/', true, FtpClient::DIR_TYPE); 

// Do whatever you want with the folders

Answer 2

If your server supports the MLSD command and you have PHP 7.2 or higher, you can use the ftp_mlsd function :

function ftp_mlsd_recursive($ftp_stream, $directory)
{
    $result = [];

    $files = ftp_mlsd($ftp_stream, $directory);
    if ($files === false)
    {
        die("Cannot list $directory");
    }

    foreach ($files as $file)
    { 
        $name = $file["name"];
        $filepath = $directory . "/" . $name;
        if (($file["type"] == "cdir") || ($file["type"] == "pdir"))
        {
            // noop
        }
        else if ($file["type"] == "dir")
        {
            $result = array_merge($result, ftp_mlsd_recursive($ftp_stream, $filepath));
        }
        else
        {
            $result[] = $filepath;
        }
    } 
    return $result;
}

If you don't have PHP 7.2, you can try to implement the MLSD command yourself. First, see the user notes for the ftp_rawlist command:
https://www.php.net/manual/en/ function.ftp-rawlist.php#101071

---

If you are unable to use MLSD, you will particularly have problems determining whether an entry is a file or a folder . While you can use the ftp_size trick, calling ftp_size for each entry can take a long time.

However, if you only need to work against one specific FTP server, you can use

ftp_rawlist to retrieve a list of files in a platform-specific format and parse it.

The following code assumes common *nix format.

function ftp_nlst_recursive($ftp_stream, $directory)
{
    $result = [];

    $lines = ftp_rawlist($ftp_stream, $directory);
    if ($lines === false)
    {
        die("Cannot list $directory");
    }

    foreach ($lines as $line)
    {
        $tokens = preg_split("/\s+/", $line, 9);
        $name = $tokens[8];
        $type = $tokens[0][0];
        $filepath = $directory . "/" . $name;

        if ($type == 'd')
        {
            $result = array_merge($result, ftp_nlst_recursive($ftp_stream, $filepath));
        }
        else
        {
            $result[] = $filepath;
        }
    }
    return $result;
}

For DOS format, see:

Get directory structure from FTP using PHP.