Check if links are broken in php

Question

I wonder if there is any good PHP script (libraries) to check if link are broken? I have links to documents in a mysql table and could possibly just check if the link leads

Answer 1

You can check for broken link using this function:

function check_url($url) {

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch , CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    $headers = curl_getinfo($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    return $headers['http_code'];
}

You need to have CURL installed for this to work. Now you can check for broken links using:

$check_url_status = check_url($url);
if ($check_url_status == '200')
   echo "Link Works";
else
   echo "Broken Link";

Also check this link for HTTP status codes : HTTP Status Codes

I think you can also check for 301 and 302 status codes.

Also another method would be to use get_headers function . But this works only if your PHP version is greater than 5 :

function check_url($url) {
   $headers = @get_headers( $url);
   $headers = (is_array($headers)) ? implode( "\n ", $headers) : $headers;

   return (bool)preg_match('#^HTTP/.*\s+[(200|301|302)]+\s#i', $headers);
}

In this case just check the output :

if (check_url($url))
   echo "Link Works";
else
   echo "Broken Link";

Hope this helps you :).