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

all the answers here that use get_headers() are doing a GET request. It's much faster/cheaper to just do a HEAD request.

To make sure that get_headers() does a HEAD request instead of a GET you should add this:

stream_context_set_default(
    array(
        'http' => array(
            'method' => 'HEAD'
        )
    )
);

so to check if a file exists, your code would look something like this:

stream_context_set_default(
    array(
        'http' => array(
            'method' => 'HEAD'
        )
    )
);
$headers = get_headers('http://website.com/dir/file.jpg', 1);
$file_found = stristr($headers[0], '200');

$file_found will return either false or true, obviously.