Removing lines in a text file based on time stamp

JimCook

I have a text based log file that has a list of IP address followed by a time stamp of when the IP address was written to the log file.

What I want to do is clean the log file and remove entries that are over X amount of hours old. If this was a SQL table I would not have a problem but it is a text file. I was thinking of running this from a cron task.

I can control the format of the log file eg how the time stamp is written but I can not port it to a SQL could PHP treat the txt file as a dataset and some how clean it ?

127.0.0.1,2009-01-02 02:00
127.0.0.2,2009-01-02 06:20
127.0.0.3,2009-01-02 05:00

Thank you for your ideas :-)

dagon

use file() to read it in to an array, then loop through it explode on the comma, process the date, write out a new file with the data you want to keep.

bradgrafelman

JimCook wrote:
I can not port it to a SQL

Why not?

JimCook

The Application that it runs on does not support SQL so i can not connect to a local or remote SQL instance :-(

JimCook

dagon;10898158 wrote:
use file() to read it in to an array, then loop through it explode on the comma, process the date, write out a new file with the data you want to keep.

Could I write it back to the same file ? other wise I could be having so many text files :-)

laserlight

JimCook wrote:
Could I write it back to the same file ?

Yes, of course, e.g., with [man]file_put_contents/man, though you may need to [man]implode/man the array back to a string.