How to find when a web page was last updated

Question

Is there  a way to find out how much time has passed since a web page was changed   For example   I have a page hosted at  www mywebsitenotupdated com  Is there a way to find out when this HTML page was uploaded to the server   I have no access to server  just a link to the webpage

User · Answer

For me it was the  article modified time   in the page source

User · Answer

This is a Pythonic way to do it   import httplib import yaml c   httplib HTTPConnection address  c request  GET   url path  r   c getresponse     get the date into a datetime object lmd   r getheader  last-modified   if lmd    None     cur data     url  datetime strptime lmd    a   d  b  Y  H  M  S  Z     else     print  Hmmm  no last-modified data was returned from the URL      print  Returned header      print yaml dump dict r getheaders     default flow style False    The rest of the script includes an example of archiving a page and checking for changes against the new version  and alerting someone by email

User · Answer

No  you cannot know when a page was last updated or last changed or uploaded to a server  which might  depending on interpretation  be three different things  just by accessing the page   A server may  and should  according to the HTTP 1 1 protocol   send a Last-Modified header  which you can find out in several ways  e g  using Rex Swain   s HTTP Viewer  However  according to the protocol  this is just         the date and time at which the origin server believes the variant was last modified        And the protocol realistically adds          The exact meaning of this header field depends on the implementation of the origin server and the nature of the original resource  For files  it may be just the file system last-modified time  For entities with dynamically included parts  it may be the most recent of the set of last-modify times for its component parts  For database gateways  it may be the last-update time stamp of the record  For virtual objects  it may be the last time the internal state changed       In practice  web pages are very often dynamically created from a Content Management System or otherwise  and in such cases  the Last-Modified header typically shows a data stamp of creating the response  which is normally very close to the time of the request  This means that the header is practically useless in such cases   Even in the case of a    static    page  the server simply picks up a file matching the request and sends it   the Last-Modified date stamp normally indicates just the last write access to the file on the server  This might relate to a time when the file was restored from a backup copy  or a time when the file was edited on the server without making any change to the content  or a time when it was uploaded onto the server  possibly replacing an older identical copy  In these cases  assuming that the time stamp is technically correct  it indicates a time after which the page has not been changed  but not necessarily the time of last change

User · Answer

There is another way to find the page update which could be useful for some occasions  if works      If the page has been indexed by Google  or by Wayback Machine you can try to find out what date s  was were  saved by them  these methods do not work for any page  and have some limitations  which are   extensively investigated in this webmasters stackexchange question s answers  But in many cases they can help you to find out the page update date s     Google way  Go by link https   www google com ua search q site 3Awww example com amp biw 1855 amp bih 916 amp source lnt amp tbs cdr 3A1 2Ccd min 3A1 2F1 2F2000 2Ccd max 3A amp tbm    You can change text in search field by any page URL you want  For example  the current stackoverflow question page search gives us as a result May 14  2014 - which is the question creation date    Wayback machine way  Go by link https   web archive org web   www example com   for this stackoverflow page wayback machine gives us more results  Saved 6 times between June 7  2014 and November 23  2016   and you can view all saved copies for each date

User · Answer

For checking the Last Modified header  you can use httpie  docs    Installation  pip install httpie --user   Usage    http -h https   martin-thoma com author martin-thoma    grep  Last-Modified  Date  Date  Fri  06 Jan 2017 10 06 43 GMT Last-Modified  Fri  06 Jan 2017 07 42 34 GMT   The Date is important as this reports the server time  not your local time  Also  not every server sends Last-Modified  e g  superuser seems not to do it

User · Answer

Open your browsers console    and enter the following   javascript alert document lastModified

[html] How to find when a web page was last updated

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