Checking a Url in Jquery/Javascript

Question

All I need is a method that returns true if the Url is responding. Unfortunately, I\'m new to jQuery and it\'s making my attempts at writing that method rather frustrating.<

Answer 1

AJAX is basically asynchronous, and that's why the behavior you are describing. I've used the following, which is free of cross origin, to get a simple true/false indication whether a URL is valid, in a synchronous manner:

function isValidURL(url) {
    var encodedURL = encodeURIComponent(url);
    var isValid = false;

    $.ajax({
      url: "http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22" + encodedURL + "%22&format=json",
      type: "get",
      async: false,
      dataType: "json",
      success: function(data) {
        isValid = data.query.results != null;
      },
      error: function(){
        isValid = false;
      }
    });

    return isValid;
}

The usage is then trivial:

var isValid = isValidURL("http://www.wix.com");
alert(isValid ? "Valid URL!!!" : "Damn...");

Hope this helps