need to copy remote file daily

[psieczko]

Hi,

I'm new to php development and could use some help.

There is a statistics file that is updated on a remote website daily. I want to read in and transform the information in that file to use on my website. Right now I just download the file to my PC then FTP to my account. I did this just so I could do the rest of the development for the project but now I need to automate the fetching on the input data.

Unfortunately, all the examples in my books and a few of the sites I've checked accomplish what I want to do by passing a URL to fopen. It would be great if I could implement it that way but my darn web host has allow_url_fopen set to false. I'm not sure how to proceed as I'm a newbie and need examples to work from.

Am I just out of luck? Is my webhosts PHP settings going to be too restrictive for me to have any hopes of using URLs in this way? Is there any workaround solution that a relative novice can implement?

Thanks,
Paul

[sleepingdanny]

Why don't you just use "include("URL")" ??
If you know the URL of the file, you can just include it in your site and when the other site update this file, then you will get the same update in your site...

[Natty_Dreadlock]

I guess include("URL") has the same restrictions as fopen("URL")... One chance u have is to open a socket via fsockopen in order to connect to your server, send the protocol commands and store the results....

[psieczko]

definitely couldn't do include. Like natty said it would likely be prohibited operation for a URL just as fopen is. But most of all b/c I don't want to simply display the remote page... I want to manipulate the data from the page in several ways and then display it.
I'll have to look into this fsockopen. It doesn't seem to be in my book so I'll need to look online.