Easy way to test a URL for 404 in PHP?

Question

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. */

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).
*/

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

With strager's code, you can also check the CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE for other codes. Some websites do not report a 404, rather they simply redirect to a custom 404 page and return 302 (redirect) or something similar. I used this to check if an actual file (eg. robots.txt) existed on the server or not. Clearly this kind of file would not cause a redirect if it existed, but if it didn't it would redirect to a 404 page, which as I said before may not have a 404 code.

function is_404($url) {
    $handle = curl_init($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);
    curl_close($handle);

    /* If the document has loaded successfully without any redirection or error */
    if ($httpCode >= 200 && $httpCode < 300) {
        return false;
    } else {
        return true;
    }
}

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).

If you are looking for an easiest solution and the one you can try in one go on php5 do

file_get_contents('www.yoursite.com');
//and check by echoing
echo $http_response_header[0];

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.