how can i use wildcards in a web address to download a file where the filename periodically changes

Question

i am downloading files from a web server into my IOS iPad application. my problem is that now the hardcoded url addresses are subject to change. how can i use wildcards in my url address to compensate for the changed address

e.g this is the current url address http://www.testserver/modules/public/sheets/HZ_TECAPET__black_gb_DE_201301.pdf

the 201301 changes, so how can i code the url address using wildcard?

e.g http://www.testserver/modules/public/sheets/HZ_TECAPET__black_gb_DE_??????.pdf

the first part of the address remains static it s just the numbers at the end that are subject to change

thanks

Answer 1

That's a bit harder then. But you can do it on the server side. You can write a simple script (BASH) that will run on the server. It will count and list all files in the directory and save results in txt, which you can access by http://example.com/files.txt

Something like:

for file in "$sheets"/*
do
  echo "$file" >> files.txt
done

EDIT:

Aha, so there actually is a pattern. Then you can try to download each of the possible patterns. Then check if the HTTP status code is 200 (OK) or 404 (Not found).