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Re: Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name

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Hello.

On 2015-12-05 at 18:39 James Harris wrote:
> Basic query: What is the best way in PHP to find a file given just the
> leftmost characters of its name? I am looking for something that will
> scale so that it can be expected to execute quickly even if there are
> thousands of files in a given directory.
[...]
> Any comments? Even if you think the idea is a bad one I would appreciate
> the feedback.

The glob function might be helpful to accomplish your goal:
<http://de2.php.net/manual/en/function.glob.php>

Another alternative might be to store the full filenames in a database
table and then do a SQL query like the following:

SELECT filename FROM files WHERE filename LIKE 'prefix%'

In this query "prefix" is the prefix which is being searched for and the 
query will return all complete filenames matching this prefix.

Which solution scales better should be examined in a setup like the
target environment and is influenced by parameters such as number of
files, filesystem type, available RAM, CPU speed etc.

> James

Regards

Markus

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Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name James Harris <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2015-12-05 17:39 +0000
  Re: Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name Arno Welzel <usenet@arnowelzel.de> - 2015-12-05 19:37 +0100
  Re: Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name Markus Heinz <markus.heinz@uni-dortmund.de> - 2015-12-05 19:45 +0100
    Re: Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name Matthew Carter <m@ahungry.com> - 2015-12-05 14:45 -0500
      Re: Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-12-05 15:53 -0500
      Re: Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name James Harris <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2015-12-06 00:50 +0000
        Re: Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name Matthew Carter <m@ahungry.com> - 2015-12-07 00:17 -0500
          Re: Fast PHP way to find a file given the leftmost characters of the file name James Harris <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2015-12-08 11:45 +0000

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