Creating a Multi-File Upload Script in PHP

As a PHP programmer I had run into a problem where a client needed a form to upload more than one file at a time. So one night I sat down and spent an hour figuring out the best and easiest way to do this. In this tutorial, the for loop is going to be your best friend.

uploadForm1.php

As you can see this first page is very basic. In my form I set the uploadNeed maxlength to 1. This way the max upload boxes he or she can get is 9. You can increase or decrease this to satisfy your own project needs.

uploadForm2.php

Ok, this page will be doing one half of the work. We will be using the for loop to get this task done.

In this page, all I did was create a simple HTML form with the value of the attribute “type” set to “file”. Within the form I put a block of code to start the for loop. I set $x to 0 and I made it stop at the desired need by setting $x to be less than $uploadNeed – the value specified by the user. I also echo the $uploadNeed into a hidden input field to be carried over to the last page.

The key to making this all work however is the $x variable I am echoing right next to the uploadFile name. What this will do is append a number starting with 0 to the name. This in turn will make each upload field’s name unique.

processFiles.php

Here is the last page to complete our multiple upload tasks.

$uploadNeed = $_POST['uploadNeed'];
// start for loop
for($x=0;$x";
 }else{
 echo "$file_name | could not be uploaded!
";
 }
} // end of loop
?>

The first thing we do in this page is grab the uploadNeed from uploadForm2.php. We setup our for loop in the same fashion as the last page. The difference here though is we get the $_FILES name within the for loop. I assign this to the local variable name $file_name.

Next, we do a little parsing by adding the stripslashes and str_replace functions. The reason we add the stripslashes is due to file that may have apostrophes in their name; otherwise this will generate a parse error and prevent that file from being uploaded.

Notice once again how I add the $x variable, which in turn is a number, to the name of the $_FILES. By doing this the script now knows which file it is uploading.

We will use the copy function now to actually begin the upload process. The last thing I added was a simple if statement to check that the copy was successful and I echo that message out to the screen.

This little script I am sure will come in handy when you have multiple files that you want to upload all at once. Some other things you could add to this script are listed below.

* Insert file names into a mysql database.
* Get the size of the file and store that in the database too.
* Create a temp text file delimited by commas for the files that have trouble uploading and at the end of the script do a retry on those files.
* Create a mass-delete of files.