what are the functions that allow you to check the response from a given url?

[emehrkay]

i have a url and i want to check to see if the page exists or is not giving back a 404 or whatever error, what functions handle this?

 

does anyone know of any prebuilt classes that may take care of these type transactions?

 

thanks

[trq]

Take a look at curl.

[radar]

You could use the file exists deal though often times that will return false for everything for an external url...

 

you might try taking a look at the get_headers function if you have php5, as i don't believe it was included in php4

 

http://us4.php.net/manual/en/function.get-headers.php

 

Also you could do a HEAD request to the URL using a socket, if you get a 200 it's

there. If you get something else it might not be (maybe it's a redirect

(301 IIRC)).

 

and here is some sample code for you on that just in case you are unware of how to use the sockets..

 

<?php
if($sock=fsockopen('hostname.tld',80))
{
fputs($sock, "HEAD /foo HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n");

while(!feof($sock))
{
echo fgets($sock);
}
}
?>

 

You can disect an url with parse_url to get the hostname/port/path from

a URL. You might want to do HTTP/1.1 request (where a Host: header is

required)

 

Hope it helps.

[emehrkay]

thanks guys, i will explore both of these

[radar]

btw -- i used "are" in my code for reading sake (if you try that) -- it should be "r" -- but being a recommended proficient i hope you knew that