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SSI Echo

In addition to including files into your page, Server Side Includes can also be used to get information from the server and write it to the page before it is sent to the reader. Though they aren’t meant as replacements for more sophisticated methods of generating dynamic content such as CGI or PHP, SSI are a nice way of adding small details to your page. Here we will discuss the file, date and time options.

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Config and Echo · Timestamp Format Codes · Advanced Formatting | Printing File Data | SSI Environment Variables

This page was last updated on 2012-08-21

Config and Echo

If you have read through the introductory tutorial on file Includes, you should now be familiar with the format of an SSI directive. They generally look like this:

We’re about to use two new ones to print the date to the page. These are config and echo — config sets the format that one of the SSI variables will be returned in (we’re gonna print the date so we’ll be using the local date variable, DATE_LOCAL), and echo writes one of the variables into the file.

The time returned is the time on the server. This will most likely be different from the time on your computer and your visitor’s, since they may not be in the same time zone. If you want to print the time it is on the local computer, use the JavaScript date object.

To write the current date and/or time to a .shtml file, add this line wherever you want it to show up:

This will return something like

Sun Jan 25 12:33:47 2004

Timestamp Format Codes

Above we used the %c value to return a full date and time, but there are 19 other choices for how you want the timestamp to look. The values you can give timefmt are all single characters, though you’ll need a chart to remember them all.

Value	Description	Example
`%a`	Abbreviated weekday name	Sun
`%A`	Full weekday name	Sunday
`%b`	Abbreviated month name	Feb
`%B`	Full month name	February
`%c`	Standard date & time	Mon Oct 22 11:21:55 2004
`%d`	Day of month as digit	12
`%H`	Hour number (24-hour clock)	22
`%I`	Hour number (12-hour clock)	10
`%j`	Day of the year as digit	047
`%m`	Month as digit	06
`%M`	Minute number	02
`%p`	AM or PM	PM
`%S`	Second number	1071178029
`%U`	Week number	05
`%w`	Day of the week number (with Sunday as first day)	1
`%x`	Date in standard format	01/12/05
`%X`	Time in standard format	12:04:45
`%y`	Two-digit year number	04
`%Y`	Four-digit year	2004
`%Z`	Time zone	EST

When the output is referred to as “standard” above, it means that the server will return it’s normal format for that value. This may be different from server to server.

Advanced Formatting

All these options are nice, but what you’ll probably end up doing is combining some of them to create your preferred format. For instance, to create a date like Tuesday 11 November, 2004, you would write

 

Just whack them all in there together, along with whatever punctuation you need.

Printing File Data

To print out the date and time when a file was last modified, use the flastmod command. This will return a date and time, the format of which is specified in the last timefmt directive you wrote. An example, and its output:

 Last modified on 

Last modified on 25/01/2004

You can also print out the filesize of a file with fsize. The format of the returned value depends on the directive sizefmt, which can be set to bytes for a formatted byte-count (eg: 23,720), or the default, abbrev, for an abbreviated count rounded up into kilobytes or megabytes.

 Filesize: 

SSI Environment Variables

In addition to the CGI environment variables, SSIs also have access to a number of built-in values which can be echoed to the page. These are:

DOCUMENT_NAME: The current filename.
DOCUMENT_URI: The virtual path to this document (such as /stylesheets/index.shtml).
QUERY_STRING_UNESCAPED: The unescaped version of any search query the client sent, with all characters special to the shell escaped with a backslash.
DATE_LOCAL: The current date in the server’s local time zone, as seen above.
DATE_GMT: Same as DATE_LOCAL but in Greenwich mean time.
LAST_MODIFIED: The last modification date of the current document. Subject to timefmt like the other dates.