Fabien Potencier has a new post today about an update he's made to an aging bit of code for the Symfony framework to find files on the local filesystem - sfFinder.

I used the opendir, readdir, and closedir native PHP functions, and it did the job quite well. The PHP class was named sfFinder, and it can still be found in all symfony versions. Even if the class is bundled with symfony, I know that a few people use it for all kind of stuff, not necessarily related to symfony. But the code starts to show its age; first because I learned a lot since then about PHP, and also because there is a better way now. Enter iterators!

He shows an example of how to use Iterators to search through directories recursively (RecursiveDirectoryIterator) and locate a certain filename. He also looks at making it more OOP and including filtering to remove files from the search. He's packaged up some of this logic into a new Symfony component - the Finder component - that can be used to locate files in a path, be restricted to a depth for the search, match regular expressions file names, filter by file size and much more.

If you'd like to dig into the code, check out this page on github for this new component (PHP 5.3 only).

Alex Netkachov has a new post for those using one of the popular content management systems out there and who might be looking for some resources to find some good extensions for them.

No matter how long you keep a web site, if you update it frequently, holding a community, or taking care of it in any other way, at any moment idea of changing or improve its functionality may come to your mind. If you are not a software developer then you have two options: find the developer that will do it for you or try to find extension for the CMS of your site that changes it in the way you want.

He offers a few tips on finding the right extension for your site and needs like looking out for extensions that aren't really extensions and checking the release date to make sure it's current. He also includes a few links to some of the larger CMS extension sites for Drupal, WordPress, Blogger, Joomla and DotNetNuke.

On his blog today Sameer Borate has posted a quick tutorial on how to use a PEAR package to do search and replace on your files from inside of PHP.

Searching and replacing content in files is a common task all of us do regularly. [...] Search/replace is easier from a shell prompt or an editor, but what if you have to do the same programatically in php. File_SearchReplace is a pear package that helps you search/replace in files through a nice object oriented interface.

Installation is simple (via the "pear" command line tool) and using it is just as easy. He gives a few examples of how it can be used - everything from a simple find and replace out to a more complicated regular expression search to be replaced with a string.

In response to this tutorial over on the PHPro.org website a new post has been made to the PHP in Action blog with an "even cooler" way to do the same sort of DOM fetching - XPath.

I'm a little bit surprised at the claim [the tutorial makes] that it's the "correct" (only) way, since there's at least one more that I find even cooler: XPath. Admittedly, it's slower, yet it's a more powerful language.

A quick example is included, building up from a simple search for anchor tags up to a custom query looking for just the anchor tags with a class of "bookmark".

Kevin Waterson has added three new tutorials to his PHPPro.org website recently:

• Introduction To SQL - The language used in relational databases is SQL. Regardless of the database used, a standard language is used to communicate with them all. This tutorial shows some basic concepts to using SQL.
• Reciprocal Links - Automating reciprocal links at first glance looks a daunting task. This helper class takes away much of the pain of what can be a mindlessly tedious process and simplifies it into a few easy to use class methods
• Get Links With DOM - Perhaps the biggest mistake people make when trying to get URLs or link text from a web page is trying to do it using regular expressions. The job can be done with regular expressions, however, there is a high overhead in having preg loop over the entire document many times. The correct way, and the faster, and infinitely cooler ways is to use DOM.

You can find the links to these and many other great tutorials over on the PHPPro.org website's tutorials section.