For a project I am working on I needed to iterate over all .xml files in a specific directory. I started out with a DirectoryIterator, then considered I didn't want the XML filtering to take place inside my foreach loop. I decided to add a FilterIterator to the setup, but then felt this was not the right solution either. So I turned to my favorite SPL guru, Joshua Thijssen, to see if I was overseeing some kind of filter-option in the DirectoryIterator. I didn't, but I did oversee something else: GlobIterator.

The GlobIterator lets you use functionality similar to the glob function (including being able to use wildcards in file searching) and get the resulting list back as a set of SplFileInfo objects, complete with additional metadata that can be extracted.