Powershell script to download and name files

powershell, powershell-2.0

Solution

If you must have the exact date/time shown on the page, you need to turn the solution around. Start by examining the index page (where your second excerpt came from), then work with that that to extract the URLs and timestamps, and download as you're doing but with the new file name.

Except...you can't easily parse arbitrary HTML with regular expressions. Now, if you know that this HTML is pretty static in how it's formed, you can probably get away with it. But be prepared for things to break if the court changes their page even the tiniest bit.

If you don't need that level of precision, you can use the HTTP response headers that come along with the file when you download it. From this, you can get the `Last-Modified` date as reported by the server - the last date/time the file was modified on the server itself. This isn't necessarily the date you see in the web page, but rather when they put the file out there (so if there was a 2 hour lag from production to publishing, you might see that difference).

R is my RAMdisk I use for temp stuff. Fix your paths as needed.

$client = New-Object system.net.WebClient;
$client.DownloadFile("http://app1.co.madison.il.us/circuitclerk/dockets/63/489641.TXT","r:\tempfile.txt");
$updated = Get-Date $wc.ResponseHeaders["Last-Modified"] -Format "yyyyMMdd";
Rename-Item -Path "r:\tempfile.txt" -NewName "r:\July-Updated$updated.txt";

If you were using PowerShell 3.0, you could use `invoke-webrequest` to get the file into memory then write it directly out to disk with the appropriate name, as `invoke-webrequest` returns an object containing both the response data and headers which you can then handle as needed.

Still another option would be to contact the court and see if they have another, more machine-friendly, method of accessing the data. An RSS or XML feed, or some other kind of gateway that is meant for what you're trying to do.

Problem

Original source