Easy way to test a URL for 404 in PHP?

Question

I'm teaching myself some basic scraping and I've found that sometimes the URL's that I feed into my code return 404, which gums up all the rest of my code.

So I need a test at the top of the code to check if the URL returns 404 or not.

This would seem like a pretty straightfoward task, but Google's not giving me any answers. I worry I'm searching for the wrong stuff.

One blog recommended I use this:

$valid = @fsockopen($url, 80, $errno, $errstr, 30);

and then test to see if $valid if empty or not.

But I think the URL that's giving me problems has a redirect on it, so $valid is coming up empty for all values. Or perhaps I'm doing something else wrong.

I've also looked into a "head request" but I've yet to find any actual code examples I can play with or try out.

Suggestions? And what's this about curl?

Answer 1

I found this answer here:

if(($twitter_XML_raw=file_get_contents($timeline))==false){
    // Retrieve HTTP status code
    list($version,$status_code,$msg) = explode(' ',$http_response_header[0], 3);

    // Check the HTTP Status code
    switch($status_code) {
        case 200:
                $error_status="200: Success";
                break;
        case 401:
                $error_status="401: Login failure.  Try logging out and back in.  Password are ONLY used when posting.";
                break;
        case 400:
                $error_status="400: Invalid request.  You may have exceeded your rate limit.";
                break;
        case 404:
                $error_status="404: Not found.  This shouldn't happen.  Please let me know what happened using the feedback link above.";
                break;
        case 500:
                $error_status="500: Twitter servers replied with an error. Hopefully they'll be OK soon!";
                break;
        case 502:
                $error_status="502: Twitter servers may be down or being upgraded. Hopefully they'll be OK soon!";
                break;
        case 503:
                $error_status="503: Twitter service unavailable. Hopefully they'll be OK soon!";
                break;
        default:
                $error_status="Undocumented error: " . $status_code;
                break;
    }

Essentially, you use the "file get contents" method to retrieve the URL, which automatically populates the http response header variable with the status code.

Answer 2

If you are using PHP's curl bindings, you can check the error code using curl_getinfo as such:

$handle = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($handle,  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);

/* Get the HTML or whatever is linked in $url. */
$response = curl_exec($handle);

/* Check for 404 (file not found). */
$httpCode = curl_getinfo($handle, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
if($httpCode == 404) {
    /* Handle 404 here. */
}

curl_close($handle);

/* Handle $response here. */

Answer 3

As strager suggests, look into using cURL. You may also be interested in setting CURLOPT_NOBODY with curl_setopt to skip downloading the whole page (you just want the headers).

Answer 4

this is just and slice of code, hope works for you

            $ch = @curl_init();
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com');
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1");
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);

            $response       = @curl_exec($ch);
            $errno          = @curl_errno($ch);
            $error          = @curl_error($ch);

                    $response = $response;
                    $info = @curl_getinfo($ch);
return $info['http_code'];

Answer 5

If your running php5 you can use:

$url = 'http://www.example.com';
print_r(get_headers($url, 1));

Alternatively with php4 a user has contributed the following:

This is a modified version of code from "stuart at sixletterwords dot com", at 14-Sep-2005 04:52. This version tries to emulate get_headers() function at PHP4. I think it works fairly well, and is simple. It is not the best emulation available, but it works.

Features:
- supports (and requires) full URLs.
- supports changing of default port in URL.
- stops downloading from socket as soon as end-of-headers is detected.

Limitations:
- only gets the root URL (see line with "GET / HTTP/1.1").
- don't support HTTPS (nor the default HTTPS port).

<?php
if(!function_exists('get_headers'))
{
    function get_headers($url,$format=0)
    {
        $url=parse_url($url);
        $end = "\r\n\r\n";
        $fp = fsockopen($url['host'], (empty($url['port'])?80:$url['port']), $errno, $errstr, 30);
        if ($fp)
        {
            $out  = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\n";
            $out .= "Host: ".$url['host']."\r\n";
            $out .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
            $var  = '';
            fwrite($fp, $out);
            while (!feof($fp))
            {
                $var.=fgets($fp, 1280);
                if(strpos($var,$end))
                    break;
            }
            fclose($fp);

            $var=preg_replace("/\r\n\r\n.*\$/",'',$var);
            $var=explode("\r\n",$var);
            if($format)
            {
                foreach($var as $i)
                {
                    if(preg_match('/^([a-zA-Z -]+): +(.*)$/',$i,$parts))
                        $v[$parts[1]]=$parts[2];
                }
                return $v;
            }
            else
                return $var;
        }
    }
}
?>

Both would have a result similar to:

Array
(
    [0] => HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    [Date] => Sat, 29 May 2004 12:28:14 GMT
    [Server] => Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux)
    [Last-Modified] => Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:11:55 GMT
    [ETag] => "3f80f-1b6-3e1cb03b"
    [Accept-Ranges] => bytes
    [Content-Length] => 438
    [Connection] => close
    [Content-Type] => text/html
)

Therefore you could just check to see that the header response was OK eg:

$headers = get_headers($url, 1);
if ($headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK') {
//valid 
}

if ($headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently') {
//moved or redirect page
}

W3C Codes and Definitions