"Include" but not until previous "include" has completed.

Soothsayer

Hopefully a simple problem for one of you expert coders to fix.

I'm trying to include two external scripts into a template script but ...

The first "included" script creates a new file (if the file doesn't already exist) or updates the contents of the file if it does exist.

The second "included" script has to access the file created/updated by the first script but because the file created/modified by the first script takes a period of time to create/modify ... the file is not available to the second script fast enough ...

I've been tinkering with "if file_exists" among other things but with no luck ...

So, I was wondering if there's a way to tell the second include to wait until the first include has has finished its file writing/closing operation ?

any ideas ?

Thanks in advance 😉

hitman6003

are you able to give us code from either of the include files?

Make sure that you are doing fclose() on the file in the first include, other wise it won't be accessable to the second include. In my experience, there should be no time delay between when the fclose is done and when the file can be accessed.

LoganK

Yes, make sure that you close the file with fclose(), but since PHP processes include files as they are included, then the statements will be executed sequentially, and the statements in the second include will not be processed until after the statements in the first include are processed.

A very simple include("file1.php"); include("file2.php"); will work fine.

Soothsayer

hmm, that's what I thought that the 2 includes should function sequentially ...

Here's the score in a bit more depth ...

It's a (developing offline) SMF forum with a custom theme ... In the header of the theme's template is a scrolling rss news ticker which takes its content from a locally cached XML file. The XML file is cached at user defined intervals by the freely available CaRP RSS caching script.

So ... in the custom "index template.php" I have put 2 simple includes as follows ...

// Invoke CaRP to update its locally cached XML file
// if the local file is out of date according to user
// defined update interval.

include 'carp.php';

// Display the horizontal scroller using the local XML file
// as its source for headlines

include 'rss2html.php';

CaRP does use fclose to finish writing the local XML file but it seems like "rss2html" tries to display the scroller with the data from the XML file before the XML file has been retrieved and updated thereby giving only a partially loaded page ...

As long as the XML exists and is closed the scroller displays fine ... it's only when CaRP is fopening, writing and fclosing that the scroller fails ...

I wonder if some kind of loop at the beginning of the rss2html script something like ...

"if file_exists display scroller else go back and check that the file exists again" ... or perhaps "if the file is open then continue till the file is closed" ?

Could that be done with the "continue" command perhaps ?

Thank you.