Question

I have a simple php application that uses, among others, an hourly updated external XML file.
I need to use only one of the file’s fields, thus, I used simplexml_load_file().
The problem is that this function only works with files currently saved on the server and not external ones.

How can I download the XML file periodically on the server (a download on every refresh would work too)? Thanks.

Answer 1

<?php
copy('http://www.example.com/', 'local-file.xml');
?>

copy can do this in a memory-light manner (it doesn’t need to load the entire file into memory like for example file_get_contents).