Remote file size without downloading file

Question

Is there a way to get the size of a remote file http://my_url/my_file.txt without downloading the file?

Answer 1

Here is another approach that will work with servers that do not support HEAD requests.

It uses cURL to make a request for the content with an HTTP range header asking for the first byte of the file.

If the server supports range requests (most media servers will) then it will receive the response with the size of the resource.

If the server does not response with a byte range, it will look for a content-length header to determine the length.

If the size is found in a range or content-length header, the transfer is aborted. If the size is not found and the function starts reading the response body, the transfer is aborted.

This could be a supplementary approach if a HEAD request results in a 405 method not supported response.

/**
 * Try to determine the size of a remote file by making an HTTP request for
 * a byte range, or look for the content-length header in the response.
 * The function aborts the transfer as soon as the size is found, or if no
 * length headers are returned, it aborts the transfer.
 *
 * @return int|null null if size could not be determined, or length of content
 */
function getRemoteFileSize($url)
{
    $ch = curl_init($url);

    $headers = array(
        'Range: bytes=0-1',
        'Connection: close',
    );

    $in_headers = true;
    $size       = null;

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2450.0 Iron/46.0.2450.0');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0); // set to 1 to debug
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_STDERR, fopen('php://output', 'r'));

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION, function($curl, $line) use (&$in_headers, &$size) {
        $length = strlen($line);

        if (trim($line) == '') {
            $in_headers = false;
        }

        list($header, $content) = explode(':', $line, 2);
        $header = strtolower(trim($header));

        if ($header == 'content-range') {
            // found a content-range header
            list($rng, $s) = explode('/', $content, 2);
            $size = (int)$s;
            return 0; // aborts transfer
        } else if ($header == 'content-length' && 206 != curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE)) {
            // found content-length header and this is not a 206 Partial Content response (range response)
            $size = (int)$content;
            return 0;
        } else {
            // continue
            return $length;
        }
    });

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, function($curl, $data) use ($in_headers) {
        if (!$in_headers) {
            // shouldn't be here unless we couldn't determine file size
            // abort transfer
            return 0;
        }

        // write function is also called when reading headers
        return strlen($data);
    });

    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    $info   = curl_getinfo($ch);

    return $size;
}

Usage:

$size = getRemoteFileSize('http://example.com/video.mp4');
if ($size === null) {
    echo "Could not determine file size from headers.";
} else {
    echo "File size is {$size} bytes.";
}