How can I check if a URL exists via PHP?

Question

Here:

$file = 'http://www.example.com/somefile.jpg';
$file_headers = @get_headers($file);
if(!$file_headers || $file_headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found') {
    $exists = false;
}
else {
    $exists = true;
}

From here and right below the above post, there's a curl solution:

function url_exists($url) {
    return curl_init($url) !== false;
}

When figuring out if an url exists from php there are a few things to pay attention to:

• Is the url itself valid (a string, not empty, good syntax), this is quick to check server side.
• Waiting for a response might take time and block code execution.
• Not all headers returned by get_headers() are well formed.
• Use curl (if you can).
• Prevent fetching the entire body/content, but only request the headers.
• Consider redirecting urls:
• Do you want the first code returned?
• Or follow all redirects and return the last code?
• You might end up with a 200, but it could redirect using meta tags or javascript. Figuring out what happens after is tough.

Keep in mind that whatever method you use, it takes time to wait for a response.
All code might (and probably will) halt untill you either know the result or the requests have timed out.

For example: the code below could take a LONG time to display the page if the urls are invalid or unreachable:

<?php
$urls = getUrls(); // some function getting say 10 or more external links

foreach($urls as $k=>$url){
  // this could potentially take 0-30 seconds each
  // (more or less depending on connection, target site, timeout settings...)
  if( ! isValidUrl($url) ){
    unset($urls[$k]);
  }
}

echo "yay all done! now show my site";
foreach($urls as $url){
  echo "<a href=\"{$url}\">{$url}</a><br/>";
}

The functions below could be helpfull, you probably want to modify them to suit your needs:

    function isValidUrl($url){
        // first do some quick sanity checks:
        if(!$url || !is_string($url)){
            return false;
        }
        // quick check url is roughly a valid http request: ( http://blah/... ) 
        if( ! preg_match('/^http(s)?:\/\/[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?(\/.*)?$/i', $url) ){
            return false;
        }
        // the next bit could be slow:
        if(getHttpResponseCode_using_curl($url) != 200){
//      if(getHttpResponseCode_using_getheaders($url) != 200){  // use this one if you cant use curl
            return false;
        }
        // all good!
        return true;
    }
    
    function getHttpResponseCode_using_curl($url, $followredirects = true){
        // returns int responsecode, or false (if url does not exist or connection timeout occurs)
        // NOTE: could potentially take up to 0-30 seconds , blocking further code execution (more or less depending on connection, target site, and local timeout settings))
        // if $followredirects == false: return the FIRST known httpcode (ignore redirects)
        // if $followredirects == true : return the LAST  known httpcode (when redirected)
        if(! $url || ! is_string($url)){
            return false;
        }
        $ch = @curl_init($url);
        if($ch === false){
            return false;
        }
        @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER         ,true);    // we want headers
        @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY         ,true);    // dont need body
        @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER ,true);    // catch output (do NOT print!)
        if($followredirects){
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION ,true);
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      ,10);  // fairly random number, but could prevent unwanted endless redirects with followlocation=true
        }else{
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION ,false);
        }
//      @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT ,5);   // fairly random number (seconds)... but could prevent waiting forever to get a result
//      @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        ,6);   // fairly random number (seconds)... but could prevent waiting forever to get a result
//      @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT      ,"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1");   // pretend we're a regular browser
        @curl_exec($ch);
        if(@curl_errno($ch)){   // should be 0
            @curl_close($ch);
            return false;
        }
        $code = @curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); // note: php.net documentation shows this returns a string, but really it returns an int
        @curl_close($ch);
        return $code;
    }
    
    function getHttpResponseCode_using_getheaders($url, $followredirects = true){
        // returns string responsecode, or false if no responsecode found in headers (or url does not exist)
        // NOTE: could potentially take up to 0-30 seconds , blocking further code execution (more or less depending on connection, target site, and local timeout settings))
        // if $followredirects == false: return the FIRST known httpcode (ignore redirects)
        // if $followredirects == true : return the LAST  known httpcode (when redirected)
        if(! $url || ! is_string($url)){
            return false;
        }
        $headers = @get_headers($url);
        if($headers && is_array($headers)){
            if($followredirects){
                // we want the last errorcode, reverse array so we start at the end:
                $headers = array_reverse($headers);
            }
            foreach($headers as $hline){
                // search for things like "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" , "HTTP/1.0 200 OK" , "HTTP/1.1 301 PERMANENTLY MOVED" , "HTTP/1.1 400 Not Found" , etc.
                // note that the exact syntax/version/output differs, so there is some string magic involved here
                if(preg_match('/^HTTP\/\S+\s+([1-9][0-9][0-9])\s+.*/', $hline, $matches) ){// "HTTP/*** ### ***"
                    $code = $matches[1];
                    return $code;
                }
            }
            // no HTTP/xxx found in headers:
            return false;
        }
        // no headers :
        return false;
    }

$headers = @get_headers($this->_value);
if(strpos($headers[0],'200')===false)return false;

so anytime you contact a website and get something else than 200 ok it will work

you cannot use curl in certain servers u can use this code

<?php
$url = 'http://www.example.com';
$array = get_headers($url);
$string = $array[0];
if(strpos($string,"200"))
  {
    echo 'url exists';
  }
  else
  {
    echo 'url does not exist';
  }
?>

I use this function:

/**
 * @param $url
 * @param array $options
 * @return string
 * @throws Exception
 */
function checkURL($url, array $options = array()) {
    if (empty($url)) {
        throw new Exception('URL is empty');
    }

    // list of HTTP status codes
    $httpStatusCodes = array(
        100 => 'Continue',
        101 => 'Switching Protocols',
        102 => 'Processing',
        200 => 'OK',
        201 => 'Created',
        202 => 'Accepted',
        203 => 'Non-Authoritative Information',
        204 => 'No Content',
        205 => 'Reset Content',
        206 => 'Partial Content',
        207 => 'Multi-Status',
        208 => 'Already Reported',
        226 => 'IM Used',
        300 => 'Multiple Choices',
        301 => 'Moved Permanently',
        302 => 'Found',
        303 => 'See Other',
        304 => 'Not Modified',
        305 => 'Use Proxy',
        306 => 'Switch Proxy',
        307 => 'Temporary Redirect',
        308 => 'Permanent Redirect',
        400 => 'Bad Request',
        401 => 'Unauthorized',
        402 => 'Payment Required',
        403 => 'Forbidden',
        404 => 'Not Found',
        405 => 'Method Not Allowed',
        406 => 'Not Acceptable',
        407 => 'Proxy Authentication Required',
        408 => 'Request Timeout',
        409 => 'Conflict',
        410 => 'Gone',
        411 => 'Length Required',
        412 => 'Precondition Failed',
        413 => 'Payload Too Large',
        414 => 'Request-URI Too Long',
        415 => 'Unsupported Media Type',
        416 => 'Requested Range Not Satisfiable',
        417 => 'Expectation Failed',
        418 => 'I\'m a teapot',
        422 => 'Unprocessable Entity',
        423 => 'Locked',
        424 => 'Failed Dependency',
        425 => 'Unordered Collection',
        426 => 'Upgrade Required',
        428 => 'Precondition Required',
        429 => 'Too Many Requests',
        431 => 'Request Header Fields Too Large',
        449 => 'Retry With',
        450 => 'Blocked by Windows Parental Controls',
        500 => 'Internal Server Error',
        501 => 'Not Implemented',
        502 => 'Bad Gateway',
        503 => 'Service Unavailable',
        504 => 'Gateway Timeout',
        505 => 'HTTP Version Not Supported',
        506 => 'Variant Also Negotiates',
        507 => 'Insufficient Storage',
        508 => 'Loop Detected',
        509 => 'Bandwidth Limit Exceeded',
        510 => 'Not Extended',
        511 => 'Network Authentication Required',
        599 => 'Network Connect Timeout Error'
    );

    $ch = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

    if (isset($options['timeout'])) {
        $timeout = (int) $options['timeout'];
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
    }

    curl_exec($ch);
    $returnedStatusCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    curl_close($ch);

    if (array_key_exists($returnedStatusCode, $httpStatusCodes)) {
        return "URL: '{$url}' - Error code: {$returnedStatusCode} - Definition: {$httpStatusCodes[$returnedStatusCode]}";
    } else {
        return "'{$url}' does not exist";
    }
}