Sameer Parwani

Managing files over ftp using PHP can be a pain. One of the problems is dealing with long paths that may or may not exist. Fortunately, you can create functions to ease the problems.

For example, using php’s built-in ftp_mkdir function, to create the directory “/hello/kitty” you must first create the directory “/hello” and then “/hello/kitty”. Wouldn’t it be easier to have a helper function that could be passed the full path of the final directory that you want created (”/hello/kitty”) and it would take care of creating each directory in the path by itself?

Here is the code to do it:

	// recursive make directory function for ftp
	function make_directory($ftp_stream, $dir)
	{
		// if directory already exists or can be immediately created return true
		if (ftp_is_dir($ftp_stream, $dir) || @ftp_mkdir($ftp_stream, $dir)) return true;
		// otherwise recursively try to make the directory
		if (!make_directory($ftp_stream, dirname($dir))) return false;
		// final step to create the directory
		return ftp_mkdir($ftp_stream, $dir);
	}	

	function ftp_is_dir($ftp_stream, $dir)
	{
	   // get current directory
	   $original_directory = ftp_pwd($ftp_stream);
	   // test if you can change directory to $dir
	   // suppress errors in case $dir is not a file or not a directory
	   if ( @ftp_chdir( $ftp_stream, $dir ) ) {
		   // If it is a directory, then change the directory back to the original directory
		   ftp_chdir( $ftp_stream, $original_directory );
		   return true;
	   } else {
		   return false;
	   }
	}