A PHP CLI script to ouput the contents of a whole directory tree to a JSON object.
by Ryan, 2015
http://www.ryadel.com/
It fetches a directory tree structure like this:
/images/
/gif/
man.gif
woman.gif
/jpg/
photo1.jpg
photo2.jpg
/png/
avatar.png
howto.txt,
readme.md
and outputs its contents into a json-formatted file like this:
{
"gif": [
"man.gif",
"woman.gif"
],
"jpg": [
"photo1.jpg",
"photo2.jpg"
],
"png": [
"avatar.png"
],
"0": "howto.txt",
"1": "readme.md"
}
It can be very useful when working with Javascript frameworks and/or similar scenarios where you need to load/browse/show a directory structure without being allowed to access the system IO.
The json conversion is handled by the native php json_encode function (available in PHP 5 >= 5.2.0, PECL json >= 1.2.0, PHP 7). For further info on PHP's json_encode function, read here:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php
The generated JSON object will adopt the following conventions:
- If a folder contains only files (without subfolders), they will be listed as items of a single array.
- If a folder contains one or more subfolders, each one will be listed as a key/value array.
- If a folder contains files and subfolders, both will be listed as a key/value array: each file will have an auto-generated numeric key starting from 0 (numbers already used by a subfolder's name will be skipped).
The code it's meant to be used as a dedicated CLI script, but you can also execute it from a standard, web-hosted PHP page by populating the $argv[] array directly from code. If you need further help to implement it into a PHP page, contact me and I'll update the docs accordingly.
> php dir2json <targetFolder> <outputFile> [JSON_OPTIONS]
JSON_OPTIONS is a bitmask consisting of:
JSON_HEX_QUOT, JSON_HEX_TAG, JSON_HEX_AMP, JSON_HEX_APOS, JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK,
JSON_PRETTY_PRINT, JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES, JSON_FORCE_OBJECT, JSON_PRESERVE_ZERO_FRACTION,
JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE, JSON_PARTIAL_OUTPUT_ON_ERROR
The behaviour of these constants is described on the JSON constants page: http://php.net/manual/en/json.constants.php
> php dir2json ./images out.json JSON_PRETTY_PRINT