How can one check to see if a remote file exists using PHP?

Question

The best I could find, an if fclose fopen type thing, makes the page load really slowly.

Basically what I\'m trying to do is

Answer 1

CoolGoose's solution is good but this is faster for large files (as it only tries to read 1 byte):

if (false === file_get_contents("http://example.com/path/to/image",0,null,0,1)) {
    $image = $default_image;
}