Changing Date within a file

rwdawg10

I have an HTML file that has a date line inside that changes on a monthly basis. I was wanting to setup a cron'd PHP script that would open, find the date, and change it to the correct date without having to manually do it every month. Please help, this is driving me crazy!

devinemke

is the date the only thing in that file or is there other stuff that you want to keep? when you say "correct day" i assume you mean the current date. anyway, here's the basic idea:

$handle = fopen('/path/to/date.html', 'w');
fwrite($handle, date('Y-m-d'));
fclose($handle)

this would overwrite the file with the current date. if there is other stuff you wish to keep then you would have to parse the contents first to locate the old date.

rwdawg10

Yeah, there is a bunch of text to parse through in order to get to the date (it's on the second to the last line). I was thinking of creating a .dat file that will house all of the future dates that will be entered into the file, but that seems like overkill to have to open a bunch of different files to just change a date. Thanks for the reply.

devinemke

Originally posted by rwdawg10
Yeah, there is a bunch of text to parse through in order to get to the date (it's on the second to the last line).

then use [man]file[/man] to spool the file into an array and just grab the contents of the second to last index ([man]count[/man] - 1).

Roger_Ramjet

How about output buffering. Have a php file that has the html with a var where the date would be. Substitute the required date to produce the required html and grab it back from the buffer, then save it as a file.

start buffering ob_start()
grab buffer contents ob_get_contents()

rwdawg10

Guys, I really appreciate it. Both of the options are easily manipulative to get what I need. Thanks a bunch!