Hello guys,
I know the basics of PHP, but have one minor problem, where I have not found a good solution myself.
I have a script, which fetches external data, processes it and finally saves the
processed data in a text file. The data is updated only if a certain time has passed from the previous update. I am using filemtime($file) and time() for comparison and it works.
So far everything OK. But after the data has been updated I show the data on my webpage and at the bottom of all information I am trying to display the time for next available update, again using filemtime() function. What happens is that the second filemtime retrieves the original (previous) update time, not the new one. So, it seems the server does not return the right modification right after saving the file. If I make the script to reload the page, the problem is corrected, but I would not want a reload in this case. Any suggestions? I know that writing the saving time into the file itself and using that in the script solves the problem, but that sounds a bit too "heavy".
Thanks in advance,
Lauro

This post has been edited by lauro: 17 Nov, 2006 - 12:51 PM

filetime() i believe gives the time that the file was previously updated. If you want it to tell the next update time then get the filetime() then add a certain number to it so that it changes. I am not sure that this works great or anything but it may work.

Thanks for your suggestion. It made me check php.net for filemtime() function.
And the solution was there! Filemtime is one of those file functions, which caches
the information. If the same file is being checked multiple times within a single script, one must use clearstatcache. So my code looks like this now:



Now the second call of the same function gives a correct result.
- Lauro -