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Index › Programming Questions & Help › Syntax Questions › Reading the contents of a directory
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Reading the contents of a directory? (Read 1134 times)
vitaflo
Reading the contents of a directory?
Dec 24th, 2005, 6:04am  
One thing I'd like to do on the next project I'm going to work on is read the contents of a directory and load the info into an array.  Really all I need is the names of all the files in a given directory and can just load their names into the array as strings, but I can't seem to find a way in Processing to do this.

I see I can load the contents of a single file into an array, but that doesn't help me any, as writing the entire directory list to a file manually would defeat the purpose (and wouldn't be dynamic).

I feel as though I'm missing something obvious, but I'm not sure.  Anyone have any ideas here?
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watz
Re: Reading the contents of a directory?
Reply #1 - Dec 24th, 2005, 9:29am  
Easily done in Java:

Code:
File [] files=new File("nameofdirectory").listFiles();
for(int i=0; i<files.length; i++) println(files[i]);
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marius watz // unlekker // code & form // Generator.x
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mflux
Re: Reading the contents of a directory?
Reply #2 - Dec 24th, 2005, 11:19pm  
Very cool. This sort of thing should belong in the learning section.
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watz
Re: Reading the contents of a directory?
Reply #3 - Dec 25th, 2005, 1:12pm  
Slight amendment: The code above gives you an array of File objects, not the filenames themselves. If you just wanted the names then this would do it:

Code:
File [] files=new File("nameofdirectory").listFiles();
String filenames[]=new String[files.length];
for(int i=0; i<files.length; i++) {
  filenames[i]=files[i].getAbsolutePath();
  println(filenames[i]);
}
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marius watz // unlekker // code & form // Generator.x
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vitaflo
Re: Reading the contents of a directory?
Reply #4 - Dec 27th, 2005, 6:33am  
I did some research online about the Java for this and realized the file objects, and also saw how to get the names, but it's good you posted it for others.  I appreciate the help, this sets me on a good track.
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seltar
Reading the contents of a directory online?
Reply #5 - Dec 28th, 2005, 4:55am  
how would one go about doing this with a folder on the server the applet is hosted on?

thanks

-seltar
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watz
Re: Reading the contents of a directory?
Reply #6 - Dec 28th, 2005, 11:16am  
For security reasons that's not normally possible. I found one link that gives more info:

http://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-0185.html
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marius watz // unlekker // code & form // Generator.x
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seltar
Re: Reading the contents of a directory?
Reply #7 - Dec 28th, 2005, 9:46pm  
Thanks, but i solved it using PHP.. read the directory, and caught the information in processing in an array..

thanks again though Smiley
you can see it in action here:
Rings Advanced

-seltar
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watz
Re: Reading the contents of a directory?
Reply #8 - Dec 28th, 2005, 10:14pm  
Using PHP is a good solution, should have thought of that.
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marius watz // unlekker // code & form // Generator.x
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fry
Re: Reading the contents of a directory?
Reply #9 - Dec 29th, 2005, 3:25pm  
yeah, just be careful about how you write the php script for file access.. you don't want folks to be able to list arbitrary directories on your machine via the use of ../ and things like that.
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