PHP Curl allows you to validate if a given URL exists. What you need to do is just a simple function as follows, which takes an input URL and returns the code. If the returned code is 200, then the URL exists, else it doesn’t!
$statusCode = validate($_REQUEST['url']);
if ($statusCode==’200′)
echo ‘Voila! URL ‘.$_REQUEST['url'].
’ exists, returned code is :’.$statusCode;
else
echo ‘Opps! URL ‘.$_REQUEST['url'].
’ does NOT exist, returned code is :’.$statusCode;
function validateurl($url)
{
// Initialize the handle
$ch = curl_init();
// Set the URL to be executed
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
// Set the curl option to include the header in the output
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
// Set the curl option NOT to output the body content
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
/* Set to TRUE to return the transfer
as a string of the return value of curl_exec(),
instead of outputting it out directly */
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// Execute it
$data = curl_exec($ch);
// Finally close the handle
curl_close($ch);
/* In this case, we’re interested in
only the HTTP status code returned, therefore we
use preg_match to extract it, so in the second element
of the returned array is the status code */
preg_match(“/HTTP\/1\.[1|0]\s(\d{3})/”,$data,$matches);
return $matches[1];
}
?>
For more information about CURL, find out more at PHP.net
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