Searching all files in folder for strings

Question

I am looking for the fastest approach for searching for some string into some folder structure. I know that I can get all content from the file with file_get_contents, but I am not sure if is fast. Maybe there is already some solution that works fast. I was thinking about using scandir to get all files and file_get_contents to read it's content and strpos to check if the string exist.

Do you think there is some better way od doing this?

Or maybe trying to use php exec with grep?

Thanks in advance!

https://github.com/skfaisal93/AnyWhereInFiles – Faisal Shaikh Dec 31 '15 at 15:21 — Faisal Shaikh, Dec 31 '15 at 15:21

score 19 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

Your two options are DirectoryIterator or glob:

$string = 'something';

$dir = new DirectoryIterator('some_dir');
foreach ($dir as $file) {
    $content = file_get_contents($file->getPathname());
    if (strpos($content, $string) !== false) {
        // Bingo
    }
}

$dir = 'some_dir';
foreach (glob("$dir/*") as $file) {
    $content = file_get_contents("$dir/$file");
    if (strpos($content, $string) !== false) {
        // Bingo
    }
}

In terms of performance, you can always compute the real-time speed of your code or find out memory usage quite easily. For larger files, you might want to use an alternative to file_get_contents.

your solutions checks filenames and I need to check file content. is there a big difference to the code? — Bob, Feb 23 '13 at 14:55

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 23 '13 at 14:32

3

use directory iterator and foreach: http://php.net/manual/en/class.directoryiterator.php

answered Feb 23 '13 at 14:32

is that faster than grep and file_get_contents? – Bob Feb 23 '13 at 14:34

Searching all files in folder for strings

2 Answers2

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