parsing files and fopen (i think)

Anon

Hi,

I am required to synchronize my clients site’s pricing with the same exchange rates employed by the cc processing company (WorldPay). Unfortunately their integration guide gives no real guidance on how to achieve this.

Basically they provide an url (https://select.worldpay.com/blahblah)which returns a text file like the one below containing the current rates.

#Exchange rates for installation 1234
#Fri Oct 01 15:53:51 GMT 2000
DEM_CHF=0.8293301380534893
DEM_NLG=1.1267390120015601
DEM_DEM=1.0
DEM_CAD=0.7811273640705966
rateDateString=1999-10-01
DEM_BEF=20.625463396943164
rateDateMillis=938736000000
allRatesCurrent=true
DEM_FRF=3.353854814359919
DEM_GBP=0.3364112383046616

What I need to be able to do is, at a certain time each day, get the current rates an put them in a table in my DB. Something like
Currency....Rate
CHF....0.8293301380534893
NLG....1.1267390120015601

I know this has something to do with cron and fopen but if anybody could provide any specifics or general guidance I (and the many other people who ask me the same question) would be sooo gratefull..this really is a showstopper for me

P.S The property name=value lines are generated in a random order so I cannot rely on any particular ordering of the items.

Platform
Linux\Apache
PHP 4.03
MySQL 3.23.32
Have telnet

Thanks
Stephen Moran

[deleted]

Read the man page of cron and crontab to see how to start a job at a given time.

Read the PHP manual installation section for info on how to get a CGI version (required to run scripts from the crontab)

As for the file, as each entry is on one line, I'd first
get the file on my server using the fopen() statement.
There's an example of how to read the full page and save it in the manual:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php

Then I'd open the stored file and read it into an array using the file() function:

$aLines=file("filename.txt")

now each line in the file becomes one element in the array.

Now you can go through all entries using:

for ($t=0;$t<count($aLines);$t++)
{
list($key,$value)=explode("=",$aLines[$t])
echo $key." ".$value;

Process the key and value

};

roel_v

... yes but you'd have to use fsockopen() to do this, this company is providing him with a url. So, you'd have to open a connection to their webserver with fsockopen(), write "GET /path/to/file/filename.txt HTTP1.1" (and maybe "Host: hostname" if they're using name based virtual hosting) and read from the filehandle you get back from this. Put what you get into a string, split it by "\n", parse the single lines like described in Vincent's post.

For cron:
23 nobody /usr/local/bin/php scriptname.php
will run the script as user nobody every 23th minute of the hour. The five fields are minute, hour, day, month and weekday, so for example
1 would run your script every day at 1 am.

[deleted]

There's no fsockopen() involved anywhere in my example.

Just use fopen("url") to get the file. Don't mess with fsock unless you know what you are doing.

roel_v

Ha yes, I misread your comment, I thought you were suggesting to get the file to his server some other way and then only use php to read it and process it. Indeed fopen on a url is easier, though I always use fsockopen() because I often have to pass through a proxy. Not to be a 'muggezifter' ;-), but I still would not suggest to write it temporarily to a file, he can directly read it into an array. Ah well :-)

[deleted]

Hmm yes he could probably read it immediately from the net.

However, I would start by copying it to disk, because
during development you can download the file once, then comment out the file-download routine and develop/debug the file parser by reading the file from disk. That saves you oodles of time.