Shuffling a RecursiveIteratorIterator object in PHP

Question

I'm trying to get the list of the files in a directory, but RecursiveIteratorIterator object gets them alphabetically. Is there any way to shuffle a RecursiveIteratorIterator object in PHP?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Shuffling an iterator does not make sense because you cannot know how to shuffle until you have seen the entirety of the results, and once you do that we 're no longer dealing with an iterator but rather with a materialized collection.

That means in the general case there is only a single option available:

$data = iterator_to_array($iterator);
shuffle($data);