Determine in php script if connected to internet?

Question

How can I check if I\'m connected to the internet from my PHP script which is running on my dev machine?

I run the script to download a set of files (which may or ma

Answer 1

This code was failing in laravel 4.2 php framework with an internal server 500 error:

Which I didn't want to stress myself to figure that out, hence I tried this code and it worked for me:

function is_connected()
{
  $connected = fopen("http://www.google.com:80/","r");
  if($connected)
  {
     return true;
  } else {
   return false;
  }

} 

Please note that: This is based upon the assumption that the connection to google.com is less prone to failure.