filemtime problem

[sois]

I am having trouble getting the timestamp for when a remote file was last updated.

Say i wanted to have on my site the last time www.espn.com/index.html
was updated

or any other remote site for example.

Any ideas how the syntax on this works?

[swr]

According to the [man]filemtime[/man] manual page, "As of PHP 5.0.0 this function can also be used with some url wrappers." Presumably 4.x does not have any support for URLs with filemtime().

You can use URLs with fopen, which might be what you need to do. Open the URL, read it, find the "last modified" string in the HTML with [man]preg_match/man.

If the page itself doesn't have a "last modified" string, you might be able to get it from the HTTP headers from the URL. This would require an [man]fsockopen[/man] to the site, sending an HTTP request (HEAD would probably suffice (instead of GET or POST)), and reading the headers looking for the "last modified" property.

If the page doesn't have "last modified" text in it, and the server is not sending a "last modified" header, then there is no way to get the information from the page except to request the page at regular intervals and note for yourself when the page has been changed.

[Weedpacket]

To add something swr missed, you could add a n If-Modified-Since: header to the request, giving the time and date you last looked (which you'll need to have remembered). If the page hasn't been modified since that time you should get a 304 Not Modified header in response.

If it is modified, then you can go ahead with the normal retrieve-the-page business.
Reference: RFC2616