I have a website that lists pdf files for downloading, with links to each file.

What I want to do now is design a search page that will look in the folder that contains these docs and search for docs that match a partial name.

I have created search pages for MySQL before - do I have to create a table with file names and links and then do a search of MySQL?

TIA,

jej1216

It is possible, however it is said that such functions are subject to vulnerability.

Still - I have made such thing and it is quite self-maintaining page you will get out of it.
See the PHP manual for functions readdir and scandir. It is quite simple to do it.

If you know what OS they use. Searching for folders/files is doable.

It is possible to search the directories for files using the PHP file functions like mentioned. See: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.opendir.php

You'd get better performance by indexing the files in a db like you said, since searching database rows is much faster than scanning a directory, especially if you have many files.

Thanks for all of the quick replies!

I'll try the opendir and scandir and see if that is quick enough for our purposes. If it's too slow, I'll do the database approach.

Rhyan - you said "It is possible, however it is said that such functions are subject to vulnerability." What vulnerablility? Hacking?

Thanks everyone.

jej1216

they can be exploited to form a DoS attack
servers which have PHP safe mode enabled (most hosted ones) dont allow these potentially dangerous commands