file_get_contents when url doesn't exist

Question

I\'m using file_get_contents() to access a URL.

file_get_contents(\'http://somenotrealurl.com/notrealpage\');

If the URL is not real, it r

Answer 1

With such commands in PHP, you can prefix them with an @ to suppress such warnings.

@file_get_contents('http://somenotrealurl.com/notrealpage');

file_get_contents() returns FALSE if a failure occurs, so if you check the returned result against that then you can handle the failure

$pageDocument = @file_get_contents('http://somenotrealurl.com/notrealpage');

if ($pageDocument === false) {
    // Handle error
}

Answer 2

To avoid double requests as commented by Orbling on the answer of ynh you could combine their answers. If you get a valid response in the first place, use that. If not find out what the problem was (if needed).

$urlToGet = 'http://somenotrealurl.com/notrealpage';
$pageDocument = @file_get_contents($urlToGet);
if ($pageDocument === false) {
     $headers = get_headers($urlToGet);
     $responseCode = substr($headers[0], 9, 3);
     // Handle errors based on response code
     if ($responseCode == '404') {
         //do something, page is missing
     }
     // Etc.
} else {
     // Use $pageDocument, echo or whatever you are doing
}

Answer 3

While file_get_contents is very terse and convenient, I tend to favour the Curl library for better control. Here's an example.

function fetchUrl($uri) {
    $handle = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_URL, $uri);
    curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POST, false);
    curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, false);
    curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
    curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);

    $response = curl_exec($handle);
    $hlength  = curl_getinfo($handle, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE);
    $httpCode = curl_getinfo($handle, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    $body     = substr($response, $hlength);

    // If HTTP response is not 200, throw exception
    if ($httpCode != 200) {
        throw new Exception($httpCode);
    }

    return $body;
}

$url = 'http://some.host.com/path/to/doc';

try {
    $response = fetchUrl($url);
} catch (Exception $e) {
    error_log('Fetch URL failed: ' . $e->getMessage() . ' for ' . $url);
}

Answer 4

You need to check the HTTP response code:

function get_http_response_code($url) {
    $headers = get_headers($url);
    return substr($headers[0], 9, 3);
}
if(get_http_response_code('http://somenotrealurl.com/notrealpage') != "200"){
    echo "error";
}else{
    file_get_contents('http://somenotrealurl.com/notrealpage');
}

Answer 5

You may add 'ignore_errors' => true to options:

$options = array(
  'http' => array(
    'ignore_errors' => true,
    'header' => "Content-Type: application/json\r\n"
    )
);
$context  = stream_context_create($options);
$result = file_get_contents('http://example.com', false, $context);

In that case you will be able to read a response from the server.

Answer 6

Each time you call file_get_contents with an http wrapper, a variable in local scope is created: $http_response_header

This variable contains all HTTP headers. This method is better over get_headers() function since only one request is executed.

Note: 2 different requests can end differently. For example, get_headers() will return 503 and file_get_contents() would return 200. And you would get proper output but would not use it due to 503 error in get_headers() call.

function getUrl($url) {
    $content = file_get_contents($url);
    // you can add some code to extract/parse response number from first header. 
    // For example from "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" string.
    return array(
            'headers' => $http_response_header,
            'content' => $content
        );
}

// Handle 40x and 50x errors
$response = getUrl("http://example.com/secret-message");
if ($response['content'] === FALSE)
    echo $response['headers'][0];   // HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
else
    echo $response['content'];

This aproach also alows you to have track of few request headers stored in different variables since if you use file_get_contents() $http_response_header is overwritten in local scope.