Make a little robot to check link validity

[jwwceo]

I have a site which indexes t-shirts and make it easy to find shirts from many different stores at the same time. Each shirt has a link in the database. I want a way to maybe run a cron job once a week or so to pull all the links from the database and make sure they still work, in case a product has been discontinued. I am thinking there will have to be some kind of criteria to verify that the page the robot surfs to is still a valid product page...for example an expired product page may simply default to that sites homepage. So it would still return a page...but the shirt is still expired.

 

Any ideas how to approach this or which functions to use.

 

I have no idea really.

 

James

[phpSensei]

Maybe use the

curl_error

function to check if it returns any errors.