Sorting Files into Folders - So STUCK!

I'm getting really stuck here...

I have a list of files that I read from a folder:

thumb.Aaliyah-1.jpg
thumb.Aaliyah-22.jpg
thumb.Aaliyah-3.jpg
thumb.Abi-Titmuss-1.jpg
thumb.Abi-Titmuss-2.jpg
thumb.Abi-Titmuss-3.jpg
thumb.Ada-Nicodemou-6.jpg
thumb.Ada-Nicodemou-7.jpg
thumb.Adele-Silva-3.jpg
thumb.Adele-Silva-4.jpg
thumb.Adriana-Karembeu-1.jpg

Code (markup):

I want to take the middle name, ex. Aaliyah or Ada-Nicodemou, and create a folder from that name. Then I want to move all related thumnails to that created folder. So far I was able to list the names only but if the names has 2 digits, ex Aaliyah-22, is outputs Aaliyah- since I'm using preset amount of characters to remove using the substr() function.

So I was able to finally get the following list after trying many ways:

Aaliyah
Aaliyah-
Aaliyah
Abi-Titmuss
Abi-Titmuss
Abi-Titmuss
Ada-Nicodemou
Ada-Nicodemou
Adele-Silva
Adele-Silva
Adriana-Karembeu

Code (markup):

You can see that "Aaliyah-" problem I mentioned earlier. So now I've come to a block and need some input about how to continue forward to reach my goal wrote about up above.

Thanks!


Here's the code I have so far:

<?php

    $dir = 'C:\wamp\www\filesorter\thumbs';
    $dir_handle = @opendir($dir) or die("Unable to open $dir");
    $clist = array();
    while (false !== ($file = readdir($dir_handle)))
	{
   		if($file!="." && $file!=".." && $file!="Thumbs.db" && $file!="Thumbs.")
          $clist[$file] = $file;
	}
	closedir($dir_handle);

    sort($clist);

    foreach ($clist as $key => $file1) {
        $rfile = str_replace("thumb.","",$file1);
        $refile = str_replace(".jpg","",$rfile);
        $dirname = substr("$refile", 0, -2);
        echo "$dirname<br />";
    }

?>

PHP:

 

Try this:

<?php

$dir = 'C:\wamp\www\filesorter\thumbs';

$files = array();
$pattern = '/^thumb\.(.*)\-[0-9]+\.jpg$/';

$dh = @opendir($dir) or die('Could not open directory for reading.');
while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false) 
	if (!is_dir($file) && $file !== 'Thumbs.' && $file !== 'Thumbs.db')
	{
		$matches=array();
		preg_match($pattern, $file, $matches);
		if ($matches[1] && !isset($files[$matches[1]]))
			$files[$matches[1]]=$matches[1];
	}
@closedir($dh);

foreach ($files as $dirname)
	echo $dirname,'<br />';

?>

PHP:

 

Worked like a charm... could you explain a little bit what you changed though? I hate just being given code and not learning what it does. Thanks a bunch!

 

Sure...

Only a minor change on this line:

    if (!is_dir($file) && $file !== 'Thumbs.' && $file !== 'Thumbs.db')

Code (markup):

Which checks if the item read is a directory or one of the files to ignore. Rather than hardcode '.' and '..', this accommodates the (perhaps undesired) chance that there's a subdirectory in your thumbnail directory.

In the while loop, I used the preg_match() pattern matching function to extract only the part of the filename you want.

The pattern sent to preg_match is really where the action is:

$pattern = '/^thumb\.(.*)\-[0-9]+\.jpg$/';

Code (markup):

This is a standard (PERL-compatible) regular expression. The '^' at the start means that the string we're matching starts with the characters that follow it (which in our case are the letters 'thumb.') Note that the '.' in 'thumb.' has an escape character before it.

So we skip everything up until the name using this part of the pattern:

^thumb\.

Code (markup):

Next, we tell the pattern to match any character, which is what the (.*) phrase means. Because it's in parentheses, it will be saved into a variable for us to retrieve later.

Now, if we stopped there, the pattern would match to the end of the string. But we don't want the tail end of it -- the part with '-11.jpg' or whatever. So we add a part to the pattern which ignores that:

\-[0-9]+\.jpg$

Code (markup):

This means "match the dash character, followed by one or more number characters, followed by '.jpg'

Notice in the call to preg_match that we send in the $matches() array. On return from the call, this will contain the results of our match, the part in (.*)

However, the FIRST entry in the array is always the complete input variable, which is why you see me using $matches[1] everywhere instead of $matches[0].

The next part of the while loop simply looks to see if the name is already in the array, and if not it adds it.


90% of the work here is knowing how to use regular expressions

 

Wow, that's awesome... I really appreciate it, thanks!