How to check if a webpage exists. jQuery and/or PHP

Question

I want to be able to validate a form to check if a website/webpage exists. If it returns a 404 error then that definitely shouldn\'t validate. If there is a redirect...I\'m

Answer 1

It sounds like you don't care about the web page's contents, you just want to see if it exists. Here's how I'd do it in PHP - I can stop PHP from taking up memory with the page's contents.

/*
 * Returns false if the page could not be retrieved (ie., no 2xx or 3xx HTTP
 * status code). On success, if $includeContents = false (default), then we
 * return true - if it's true, then we return file_get_contents()'s result (a
 * string of page content).
 */
function getURL($url, $includeContents = false)
{
  if($includeContents)
    return @file_get_contents($url);

  return (@file_get_contents($url, null, null, 0, 0) !== false);
}

For less verbosity, replace the above function's contents with this.

return ($includeContents) ? 
               @file_get_contents($url) :  
               (@file_get_contents($url, null, null, 0, 0) !== false)
;

See http://www.php.net/file_get_contents for details on how to specify HTTP headers using a stream context.

Cheers.