Bob Majdak: Extending an Iterator to use an Iterator to make your code a little cleaner

In this new post to his site Bob Majdak talks about extending iterators to help make it easier to customize it for your needs.

One of the nice things about iterators is the ability to shove them into other iterators, allowing you to wrap their functionality in other functionality to return a more precise result set. Take for example the idea that we want to read a directory to list only the images inside of it. There are two main ways to do this, via opendir / readdir functions and via FilesystemIterator objects. Going the FilesystemIterator route, one common way seems to be extend another class called FilterIterator which allows you to customize a filter based on you overwriting a method called accept().

He shows not only overriding the "accept" method, but also the constructor to make using this new iterator a much simpler (and cleaner) call. You can find out more about the FilesystemIterator (and others) over in the Iterators section of the PHP manual.