Below is a function I wrote to pull the "Last-Modified" header from a given URL. In PHP version 4.3 and above, it takes advantage of the stream_get_meta_data function, and in older version it uses a conventional GET procedure. On failure to connect to $url, it returns NULL. If the server does not return the Last-Modified header, it returns the current time. All times are returned in PHP's integer format (seconds since epoch).
Use it as so:
$last_modified = stream_last_modified('http://www.php.net/news.rss');
if (!is_null($last_modified))
if ($last_modified < time()-3600) //Older than an hour
echo 'URL is older than an hour.';
else
echo 'URL is fairly new.';
else
echo 'Invalid URL!';
function stream_last_modified($url)
{
if (function_exists('version_compare') && version_compare(phpversion(), '4.3.0') > 0)
{
if (!($fp = @fopen($url, 'r')))
return NULL;
$meta = stream_get_meta_data($fp);
for ($j = 0; isset($meta['wrapper_data'][$j]); $j++)
{
if (strstr(strtolower($meta['wrapper_data'][$j]), 'last-modified'))
{
$modtime = substr($meta['wrapper_data'][$j], 15);
break;
}
}
fclose($fp);
}
else
{
$parts = parse_url($url);
$host = $parts['host'];
$path = $parts['path'];
if (!($fp = @fsockopen($host, 80)))
return NULL;
$req = "HEAD $path HTTP/1.0\r\nUser-Agent: PHP/".phpversion()."\r\nHost: $host:80\r\nAccept: */*\r\n\r\n";
fputs($fp, $req);
while (!feof($fp))
{
$str = fgets($fp, 4096);
if (strstr(strtolower($str), 'last-modified'))
{
$modtime = substr($str, 15);
break;
}
}
fclose($fp);
}
return isset($modtime) ? strtotime($modtime) : time();
}
