CODEWITHSUNDEEP
fileiolua
G.T.D.
G.T.D.

Reputation: 396

Reading Directory for all files of a specified file type

I want to know how to do something like the following...

I have a directory, let's call this directory "D:\Folder\" and it has some file types like .json, .lua, etc and I need to be able to put the appropriate files in a table based off their file type. How do I do this via Lua without external libraries? Also, how can I get other information on the files, like size, date modified, etc via lua and store that info?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 116

Answers (1)

Paul Kulchenko
Paul Kulchenko

Reputation: 26744

As Yu Hao said in the comment, Lua by itself doesn't have any methods to get the list of files in a folder or access attributes of those files. In terms of external libraries, you can use Lua Filesystem module that has everything you need or winapi if you are looking for Windows-specific solution. Both are small libraries that can be compiled quite easily using mingw.

If you are looking for Windows-only-no-external-library solution, you should be able to run "dir" command and process its results using io.popen. You can parse the captured output and get file names, sizes, and dates based on that. You can also get the file size by using file:seek, but since you may be parsing anyway, you can get it all from the output. I don't think there is anything much simpler than that.

how about searching for a pattern that represents any and all characters a file could posses and then .file_type...and then run that through io.open for example...possible?

You won't be able to "guess" filenames by enumerating possible symbol combinations simply because this .... will .... take .... a .... very .... long .... time.

Upvotes: 1

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