Grab date from elsewhere in doc

[debbies]

This is a long-shot, but thought I'd ask.

Every page on my site has a line that reads:

Last updated: &nbsp;DD-MMM-YY<br>

where DD-MMM-YY is the date like 30-SEP-07.

Our search engine returns the current date if no "last-modified" is specified in either the header or through a meta http-equiv line. While I've been able to send the date through headers, it is not always an accurate representation of when the content was actually modified (ie: cosmetic changes, etc.).

Question is :: Is it possible with PHP to write a script that will grab the date from the last updated line in the page and use it to populate an http-equiv line in the head section of the page? If there is a way, then I can globally insert the code into every page without having to manually edit every page (we have upwards of 5000 pages on the site).

Thanks to any guru who may have an answer!

[bpat1434]

Well, if the file has been modified, you could always use [man]filemtime/man....

[debbies]

OK ... I've gotten a regex working that will grab the date parts from the string IF the string is provided as static part of eregi.

Question :: with the format of eregi:
eregi ( string $pattern, string $string [, array &$regs] )

I've got my pattern set and can figure out the array/regs part, however, how do I tell PHP that I want the $string portion to be the entire page? Or even better, have string also be a regex that looks for the "Last update...." line and then evaulates the regex pattern against that?

Any ideas out there? There must be some way to creatively and dynamically generate the string portion of the eregi.

Thanks!

[Weedpacket]

Note that the POSIX regular expression functions ereg and eregi have been deprecated in favour of the PCRE preg_match.

Where getting the "Last updated" date from a page containing that line would be

preg_match('/Last updated: &nbsp;(.*?)<br>/i', $page, $match);
$date = $match[1];