During my quest to create a semi-static site that is searchable and fast to load.

I thought while loading all of this content in with ajax and such that it would be interesting if i could do a text search within files using just php and no databases.

Here is two ways to check a single file's content using a string match

if( strpos(file_get_contents("./file.txt"),$_GET['id']) !== false) {
    // do stuff
}

or this one which uses a cmd shell grep to find the file, which i prefer not to use but will see how performance goes.

if( exec('grep '.escapeshellarg($_GET['id']).' ./file.txt')) {
	// do stuff
}

so now we have to add this to a loop through each file in a directory

header('Content-Type: application/json');

$dir = "./html/";
$file_type = ".html";
$dir_array[] = "";
$searchval = "php";

// Open a directory, and read its contents
if (is_dir($dir)){
  if ($dh = opendir($dir)){
    while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false) {
      	if (strpos($file, $file_type) !== false) {
      		if($file > " ") {
      			$file_nice = $file;
      			$file_nice = str_replace("-", " ", $file_nice);
      			$file_nice = str_replace(".html", "", $file_nice);
      			// $file = str_replace(".html", "", $file);

            if( strpos(file_get_contents($dir.$file),$searchval) !== false) {
                $dir_array[$file] = $file_nice;
            }

		    	
			}
		}
    }
    closedir($dh);
  }
}
asort($dir_array);
echo json_encode(array_filter($dir_array));	

this is untested code, but i think this should do it. it should add the file name to the array if the $searchval is located

Sources

Source