What is the significance of the "." and ".." entries returned by readdir in PHP?

The "." entry represents the current directory, and ".." represents the parent directory. These entries are returned by readdir when iterating over a directory using PHP. To exclude these entries and only retrieve the actual files and directories within the directory, you can check for and skip these entries in your loop. 

$dir = "/path/to/directory";
$dh = opendir($dir);

while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false) {
    if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
        echo $file . "<br>";
    }
}

closedir($dh);

Keywords

readdir PHP "." ".." entries

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