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 do this in few ways:

First way - curl

function url_exists($url) {
    $ch = @curl_init($url);
    @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE);
    @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, TRUE);
    @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, FALSE);
    @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
    $status = array();
    preg_match('/HTTP\/.* ([0-9]+) .*/', @curl_exec($ch) , $status);
    return ($status[1] == 200);
}

Second way - if you dont have curl installed - get headers

function url_exists($url) {
    $h = get_headers($url);
    $status = array();
    preg_match('/HTTP\/.* ([0-9]+) .*/', $h[0] , $status);
    return ($status[1] == 200);
}

Third way - fopen

function url_exists($url){
    $open = @fopen($url,'r');
    if($handle !== false){
       return true;
    }else{
       return false;
    }
}

First & second solutions