url/uri verifier (w/ del.icio.us support)

[alexku]

I am trying to develop an online link verifier that will connect into del.icio.us and help identify bookmarks that point to no existent pages. I am wondering what the best way to verify a links validity is? I don't need to load the entire page. I just need to see the status code (404 or 200 are the most important). Does anyone have an idea on how best to do this?
Thank you.

-Alex Unger

[michaellunsford]

you can do a custom HEAD request using CURL.

[code]<?php
$ch = curl_init();
$page = $filename; //the part after the URL. It will need a preceding slash.
$url = "http://example.com";
$header  = "HEAD ".$page." HTTP/1.0 \r\n";
$header .= "Connection: close \r\n";
$header .= "Accept-Encoding: gzip\r\n";
$header .= "Accept: */*\r\n";
$header .= "Accept-Language: en\r\n";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, $header);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
$retval=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
if(strpos($retval,"200 OK")) $link_is_good=true;
?>[/code]

[alexku]

michaellunsford,

I tried the code, but can't seem to get it to work. Here is an example of the variables being passed.
[code]<?php
        $ch = curl_init();
        $page = ""; //the part after the URL. It will need a preceding slash.
        $url = "http://www.google.com";
        $header  = "HEAD ".$page." HTTP/1.0 \r\n";
        $header .= "Connection: close \r\n";
        $header .= "Accept-Encoding: gzip\r\n";
        $header .= "Accept: */*\r\n";
        $header .= "Accept-Language: en\r\n";
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, $header);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
        $retval=curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
        if(strpos($retval,"200 OK")) $link_is_good=true;
?>[/code]
Is there something that I am doing wrong? What should go in the $page variable?
Thank you.

-Alex

[michaellunsford]

You just forgot the preceding slash. That way you'll actually be requesting something. ;)

[code=php:0]$page = "/"; //the part after the URL. [/code]

Answer; the page variable would be something like "/index.html"

[ShogunWarrior]

CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST only takes the request method(GET/PUT/DELETE) not the whole request header.

[alexku]

Thanks for your help.
Works great now.

-Alex