can I order the readdir?

Question

I have this code displaying a list of files but they appear in what seems like a random order, is there anyway to put them in an order eg. last uploaded, last modified or even alphabetical? any help would be very much liked.

<strong><?php echo $lang['post_attach']; ?></strong><br /><br />
<form name="attach" method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>"     ENCTYPE="multipart/form-data">
<input type="hidden" name="action" value="attach_files" />
<input type="hidden" name="form_id" value="<?php echo $form; ?>" />
<select name="files[]" size="10" multiple="true"      onChange="javascript:goChkImg(this);">
<?php

 // Read the file upload list from the file storage

$handle = opendir(CFG_PARENT."/files");
$i=0; $j=0;

 while($filename = readdir($handle)) 
 {
if($filename != "." && $filename != ".." && trim($filename)) { 
    $file_spec=explode("_", $filename);
    if($file_spec[0] == $user) {
        echo "<option value=\"{$filename}\">{$filename}</option>";
    }
}
 }
    closedir($handle);

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.readdir.php states

Returns the name of the next entry in the directory. The entries are returned in the order in which they are stored by the filesystem.

So you could read the information into an array first and sort (http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.sort.php) that or you could use other functions, e.g.

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.glob.php

which perform sorting.

See the other File functions for accessing other information you may want to sort by:

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.filesystem.php

like

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.stat.php

You could adopt the answers from here:

PHP readdir and sort

to include the information from stat().