[eluser]sophistry[/eluser]
first of all... what exactly are you trying to acheive? sometimes there are better ways that are not exactly the ways you have thought of. if you state your goal rather than outline your process you might get a better (lightning strike) solution. for instance, maybe your goal is this: "i am building a test harness and i want to make sure every helper function has a corresponding test function." as opposed to "i want to load every file and search for a string."
anyway...
if you have shell_exec (backtick) privileges you can search files faster with
Code:
// not tested
$string = shell_exec("egrep 'function .+_helper_test' /path/to/helpers/*");
or similar to reading the files one-by-one load up all the helpers using the CI loader $this->load->helper('helpername') and then use PHP's function_exists() to see if your test function is there.
cheers.
