Upgrading to PHP 5

Chapter 6. Iterators and SPL

Iteration is a key component of PHP programming. Whenever you loop through the elements of an array, the rows in a database, the files in a directory, or the lines of an HTML table, that’s iteration.

Iteration takes many forms in PHP, but the most popular two are foreach and while loops. For example:

foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
    // iterate through array elements
}

reset($array);
while (list($key, $value) = each($array)) {
    // iterate through array elements
}

Although both of these constructs solve the same problem, foreach is shorter and easier. Iteration using a while loop can also introduce subtle bugs into your code, like in this example:

// $path is valid and readable
$dir = opendir($path); 
while ($file = readdir($dir)) {
    print "$file\n";
}
closedir($dir);

This code opens and iterates through files in a directory. When there are no more files, readdir( ) returns false, the while ends, and the directory is closed. It works perfectly.

It works perfectly, that is, until someone places a file named 0 in the directory. Then, $file is set to 0, and the loop terminates early because while (0) evaluates as false. Oops.

The correct way to read files from a directory is as follows:

while (false !=  = ($file = readdir($dir))) {
    print "$file\n";
}

You need to do a strict equality check using the = = = operator. Even = = gives you the wrong results because PHP autoconverts $file from a string to a Boolean.

Since there’s no reason for you (or anyone else) ...