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website reading

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 1:37 pm
by james_4k2
Hello to all,
I am a beginner php developer and so facing problem everywhere. Anyways, my problem this time is that I have a database which has to be updated everytime a new file appears on a particular website.
The script which I have to write should go to the webpage and check if a new file is available or not. if yes then it should check when is the contents of that file effective from(as it is a billing information for health sector).
Now the problem here is the file is although a txt file but its not downloadable, its just displayed in the website as html data also the effective date and updated date is also displayed on the wepage. Can someone please guide me how to read the dates from the webpage. I went through a few articles which just converts data og the html page into a txt file and then i have to do my comparision in that txt file. I cannot do that making of extra txt file as per my manager. So can you please give me some idea.
Sorry for this long post and thanks for reading

Re: website reading

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 2:07 pm
by ghurtado
I would recommend using regular expressions for this task.