PHP - Change Variable Name - php

Question

I have two 'includes' php pages, Page 1 and Page 2.
Page 1 displays contents for today, Page 2 displays contents for yesterday.
I set a cronjob to copy contents of Page 1 to Page 2 every 0:00am daily.
On the main page (the page that contains this page 1 and page 2), I have:
$date = date("d/m", strtotime("now"));
$dateyes = date("d/m", strtotime("-1 day"));
Then on Page 1, I have:
echo $date;
On Page 2, what I need is:
echo $dateyes;
But due to the cronjob, I only get
echo $date;
on that Page 2. Is there a way I can change that $date to $dateyes on that Page 2?

Answer 1

Not really sure how copying a php script from day to day should work in practice, but if need this pattern for some reason, simply replace your current echo $date; to echo $is_page1 ? $date : $dateyes;
Where $is_page a variable that check which page is loaded via something like:
$is_page1 = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] === 'page1.php';
Or:
$is_page1 = basename(__FILE__) === 'page1.php';

Answer 2

I found a solution.
On the mainpage.php, I checked if "dateyes" already exists in page2.php, if it already exists, script does nothing but if "dateyes" does not exist, my script searches for "date" in that page2.php and since what I needed on page2.php was "dateyes", I replaced "date" with "dateyes".
On mainpage.php
$datetod = date("d/m", strtotime("now"));
$dateyes = date("d/m", strtotime("-1 day"));
$file = file_get_contents('../includes/page2.php');
if(strpos($file, "dateyes") !== false){}
else {
$str=str_replace("datetod", "dateyes",$file);
file_put_contents('../includes/page2.php', $str);
}
So I no longer worry about the cronjob which automatically copies $date from page1.php to page2.php everyday at 0:00am because the first person who loads/views the page (mainpage.php) is automatically going to change the $date in page2.php to $dateyes which is what I need.