How can I make the PHP write to the file automaticly?

Question

I want to save a web page to a text file automatically or at least every second. So I wrote a PHP file like that :

<?php

$homepage = file_get_contents('www.example.com');
echo $homepage;


$myfile = fopen("file.txt", "w") or die("Unable to open file!");

while(true) {

    fwrite($myfile, $homepage);

}
    fclose($myfile);

?>

But it did not work The file will not be written until the while loop will stop. Can someone help me with that ? I need the PHP to run all the time or at least for a few minute. How can I do that ?

Answer 1

I'd go for something like this (not tested though)

<?php
header("Refresh:30"); // The page will be refreshed every 30 seconds
                    // To avoid max_execution_time errors

$myfile = "file.txt";

for ($i=0; $i < 30; $i++) { 
    $homepage = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com");
    echo $homepage;
    file_put_contents($myfile, $homepage);
    sleep(1); // Do it every second
}

If a second is too much time, you could use usleep instead

Answer 2

That's because you don't close the file in the loop. And you should add some delay too. Change it to this:

<?php
$homepage = file_get_contents('www.example.com');
echo $homepage;
while(true) {
    $myfile = fopen("file.txt", "w") or die("Unable to open file!");
    fwrite($myfile, $homepage);
    fclose($myfile);
    sleep(1);
}
?>

Note that if you're running this on a webserver, it will exceed the time limit.

Answer 3

First off, maybe you should consider using sleep inside your loop to minimise performance impact. After every write you should invoke flush to persist data onto disk. There is also a risk of overloading target site in a form of DOS attack, so you should be mindful of the consequences.

Answer 4

This is not tested but should word... But honestly your better of using Ajax with a timer to do this.

header("Refresh:60");

function writeToPage($page,$file){

    $content = file_get_contents($page);

    file_put_contents($file,$content);

}

$page = "www.example.com";

$file = "file.txt";

$write = true;

while( $write === true ) {

    sleep(5);

    writeToPage($page,$file);

}