How can PHP developers automate the process of fetching and processing files with changing names from external sources?

To automate the process of fetching and processing files with changing names from external sources, PHP developers can use a combination of file fetching libraries like cURL or file_get_contents, along with regular expressions to match the changing file names. By dynamically generating the file URL based on a pattern and fetching the file using PHP, developers can ensure that files with changing names are consistently processed. 

<?php
// Define the base URL where the files are located
$baseUrl = 'https://example.com/files/';

// Use cURL to fetch the webpage content
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $baseUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// Use regular expressions to extract the file names from the webpage content
preg_match_all('/<a href="(.+?)">/', $output, $matches);

// Process each file by dynamically generating the file URL and fetching it
foreach($matches[1] as $fileName) {
    $fileUrl = $baseUrl . $fileName;
    
    // Process the file (e.g., download, parse, etc.)
    // Add your processing logic here
}
?>

Keywords

PHP automation file fetching file processing external sources

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