Test whether a file exists anywhere in the include path

Question

I\'m writing an autoload function and in the inner logic of it would like to test whether a certain file exists somewhere in the path prior to including it.

This is the

Answer 1

You should avoid the error supressor operator @.

function autoload($class) {
   // Build path (here is an example).
   $path = DIR_CLASSES .
           strtollower(str_replace('_', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $class)) .
           '.class.php';

   if (file_exists($path)) {
       include $path;
   }
}

spl_autoload_register('autoload'); 

$front = new Controller_Front; 
// Loads "application/classes/controller/front.class.php" for example.

Update

An important accent: I don't know where the file should be, I just want to know whether it exists in one of the directories in the include path. So I can't just do file_exists or something like this

If your class could be in a number of directories, you could...

• Have your autoload function traverse them all, looking for the class. I would not recommend this.
• Rename your classes to have a name that easily maps to a file path, like in the example code above.

If you do decide to traverse all folders looking for the class, and it becomes a bottleneck (benchmark it), you could benefit from caching the class name to file location mapping.