Entry

How do I get (ctime & mtime) on a remote file (http) without downloading it. "fstat", didn't help

Feb 24th, 2008 19:53
dman, Articles Way, Cinley Rodick, Gerhardt, Mikael Lirbank, http://www.ttnr.org

There's a suggestion in the PHP manual (look up "fstat"), but here's 
an alternative. If it doesn't return a date, it's probably because the 
server doesn't know (or I haven't read the RFC correctly).
It requires some code, but I tried to split it into 3 functions. The 
function you need to use is getModified(). This code is a complete 
example, and if you paste it into an empty .php file it should output 
a date.
<?php
	// This function returns an associative array returning any 
	// of the various components of the headers
	function getHeaders($header) {
		$lines = explode("\r\n",$header);
		$headers = Array();
		foreach($lines as $line) {			
			$header = explode(':',$line,2);
			$name = strtolower($header[0]);
			if(isset($header[1])) {
				$headers[$name] = $header[1];
			} 
		}
		return $headers;
	}
	// Connects to URL using the HEAD method and returns headers
	function connect($remote_file) {
		$url = parse_url($remote_file);
		$port = 80;		
		$path = $url['path'];
		$host = $url['host'];		
		if(isset($url['port']) && !empty($url['port'])) {
			$port = $url['port'];
		}
		if(!isset($url['path'])) {
			$path = '/';
		}
		$fp = fsockopen($host, $port) or die("Could not 
connect to $host");
		fputs($fp,"HEAD $path HTTP/1.1\r\n");
		fputs($fp,"Host: $host\r\n");
		fputs($fp,"Connection: close\r\n\r\n");
		$header = '';
		while(!feof($fp)) {
			$header .= fgets($fp,1024);
    }
		return $header;
	}
	// connects to URL and parses the headers
	function getModified($remote_file) {
		$date = '';
		$response = connect($remote_file);
		$headers = getHeaders($response);
		if(isset($headers['last-modified'])) {
			$date = $headers['last-modified'];
		}
		return $date;
	}
	// Example usage
	$date =  getModified("http://www.example.com/");
	if(empty($date))
		echo "Could not get date";
	else
		echo "Last modified: $date";
?>
======
brandonhutchinson.com/ctime_atime_mtime.html