PHP - Find latest file based on filename pattern

Question

I have a bunch of gamers data. The data is stored as json with filename pattern as gamerid_date_time_seed.json . Eg below:

8841-2018-05-03-09-56-14-2118-data.json
8841-2018-05-03-10-50-22-1568-data.json
8841-2018-05-04-04-36-51-6081-data.json
8841-2018-05-04-06-56-50-1100-data.json

In the first filename for example, 2018-05-03-09-56-14 is the year-month-date-hour-min-sec format. 8841 is the gamer id and the last 4 digits, 2118 in this case is a seed value that can be ignored.

How can I parse this so that I get only the latest data file of a gamer? (In this case 8841-2018-05-04-06-56-50-1100-data.json) The issue is that sometimes a gamer might have multiple files but for same day.

I am not very good with regular expressions and stuff so I would really appreciate some help here.

Answer 1

You can use the glob function to get an array of files, and reverse sort to get the newest file as the first item in your array.

$gamerid = 8441;
$files = glob("filepath/".$gamerid."-*.json");
rsort($files);
$newestFile = $files[0];