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

PHP's inbuilt functions may not work for checking URL if allow_url_fopen setting is set to off for security reasons. Curl is a better option as we would not need to change our code at later stage. Below is the code I used to verify a valid URL:

$url = str_replace(' ', '%20', $url);
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);  
curl_close($ch);
if($httpcode>=200 && $httpcode<300){  return true; } else { return false; } 

Kindly note the CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER option which also verify the URL's starting with HTTPS.