testing if a URL exists

[EricE]

I am looking for a way to test if a URL exists. For example, I want to know if

http://www.yahoo.com

works or it doesn't. Is there a way? Eric

 

[spookie]

hi eric

u can treat a url as a file and try to open it.

so try something like this





if($hnl = @fopen("

http://www.yahoo.com","r"))

echo "URL exists" ;

else

echo "URL doesnot exist" ;



hope that will help u

cheers

spookie

 

[spookie]

just ignore the semicolon after the url.i dont know how it appeared there

cheers

spookie

 

[EricE]

I tried it spookie...seems to work great for one thing but not for the other. The other is testing to see if a live mms://url.com/show microsoft streaming media stream is active. The fopen doesn't seem to work for that.

ty, Eric Eric

 

[spookie]

ok

if your PHP is installed as an Apache module u can make use of function apache_lookup_uri

for more info go to

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.apache-lookup-uri.php

cheers

spookie

 

[RedLion]

Hello Eric,

Once I've written an application that checked if a url existed. The primary goal was getting the result from a request to a url.

When the site didn't exist you would get a html page returned with a HTTP 404 error as title. So when you read the html source and search if <title>HTTP 404 Not found</title> exist within this source you will know if the site exists or not(or if it's in the eare or not).

I hope it will help,

Charl