Getting Page Date Modified from page

[mclamais]

How can retrieve the modified date from a html via the url?

http://domain.com/somepage.php

Is there a script I can write that can go check a page and get this date.

[Dan Grossman]

You can't do it. The modified time is not part of the HTTP response, so it's not something you can learn by accessing a URL.

[plumsauce]

You can't do it. The modified time is not part of the HTTP response, so it's not something you can learn by accessing a URL.

Umm, what about the http "Last-Modified" header?

Some sites may hide it, but most don't bother. Especially as the search engines like to see it. Caching mechanisms also depend on it. So really, it's pretty much always available on any semi-compliant server.

www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html

[Dan Grossman]

Umm, what about the http "Last-Modified" header?

Some sites may hide it, but most don't bother. Especially as the search engines like to see it. Caching mechanisms also depend on it. So really, it's pretty much always available on any semi-compliant server.

www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html

Sorry, but that header is obsolete and not to be expected anymore. Etags and more specific cache control have replaced it.

Apache 2.x default configuration does not send the last-modified header. I verified this by testing several live websites on different servers (including this website).

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:18:05 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10
Expires:
Cache-Control:
Pragma:
Etag: "629126db2c501a6cbf7bc7f3307c62fc"
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:59:48 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat)
Set-Cookie: mobify=0; path=/; domain=.sitepoint.com; expires=Sat, 12-Sep-2009 11:59:48 GMT
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.11
Cache-Control: private, max-age=600
Set-Cookie: SID=b66a9da10d3b87fe4aac89e58e0ae34c; path=/
Set-Cookie: SPabc=c; expires=Sun, 12 Sep 2010 09:59:51 GMT; path=/
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

...

[mclamais]

Thanks for the help.