Pulling a file with today's date

Ruby
1

Hi,
Can someone please help me to parse a file by its date so that, when I
ftp to a site, I only pull those files that are dated with today’s date,
nothing else? I’m OK with pulling all files over, looking at them on my
side of the fence, and then just discarding those files that aren’t
timestamped with today’s date.

Thanks,
Peter

2

On Oct 15, 1:35 pm, Peter B. [email protected] wrote:

Can someone please help me to parse a file by its date so that, when I
ftp to a site, I only pull those files that are dated with today’s date,
nothing else? I’m OK with pulling all files over, looking at them on my
side of the fence, and then just discarding those files that aren’t
timestamped with today’s date.

I believe this will depend on the FTP server running on the host,
since different FTP servers will produce different results format.

Care to post a small example of the result you see from the FTP server
when you issue a ‘dir’ command?

3

On Monday 15 October 2007, Peter B. wrote:

Hi,
Can someone please help me to parse a file by its date so that, when I
ftp to a site, I only pull those files that are dated with today’s
date,
nothing else? I’m OK with pulling all files over, looking at them on
my
side of the fence, and then just discarding those files that aren’t
timestamped with today’s date.

When you say “parse a file”, do you mean parse the contents of the file,
or simply select a specific file? I think you’re talking about
choosing a file based on the filename matching a date, but I’m not
sure.

The answer really depends on the format of the date. If it’s a nice
iso8601 format date string (i.e. YYYY-MM-DD) it’s a little easier than
other formats, but none of them is really hard. Basically all you have
to do is create a regular expression object that will match the pattern
you’re looking for. You create the regexp based off a date string that
comes from today’s date

For example, if the file is 2007-10-15-secretdata.zip:

First create a string with the current date formatted however the date
in the filename is formatted:
date_str = Time.new.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

Next create a regular expression based on that string:
file_match_regex = Regexp.new("^" + date_str + “-secretdata.zip$”)

Finally match the filenames against that regular expression:
irb(main):008:0> file_match_regex.match(“2007-10-15-secretdata.zip”)
=> #MatchData:0xb7a3be04
irb(main):009:0> file_match_regex.match(“2007-10-16-secretdata.zip”)
=> nil

If you want to do this on the remote files, you’ll probably want to use
Ruby’s FTP libraries. If you want to do it after you transfer the
files over, you can transfer the file and then check them based on
whatever matches the regexp.

Ben