How can I check if a URL exists via PHP?

Question

How do I check if a URL exists (not 404) in PHP?

Answer 1

function url_exists($url) {
    $headers = @get_headers($url);
    return (strpos($headers[0],'200')===false)? false:true;
}

Answer 2

function URLIsValid($URL)
{
    $exists = true;
    $file_headers = @get_headers($URL);
    $InvalidHeaders = array('404', '403', '500');
    foreach($InvalidHeaders as $HeaderVal)
    {
            if(strstr($file_headers[0], $HeaderVal))
            {
                    $exists = false;
                    break;
            }
    }
    return $exists;
}

Answer 3

When figuring out if an url exists from php there are a few things to pay attention to:

• Is the url itself valid (a string, not empty, good syntax), this is quick to check server side.
• Waiting for a response might take time and block code execution.
• Not all headers returned by get_headers() are well formed.
• Use curl (if you can).
• Prevent fetching the entire body/content, but only request the headers.
• Consider redirecting urls:
  • Do you want the first code returned?
  • Or follow all redirects and return the last code?
  • You might end up with a 200, but it could redirect using meta tags or javascript. Figuring out what happens after is tough.

Keep in mind that whatever method you use, it takes time to wait for a response.
All code might (and probably will) halt untill you either know the result or the requests have timed out.

For example: the code below could take a LONG time to display the page if the urls are invalid or unreachable:

<?php
$urls = getUrls(); // some function getting say 10 or more external links

foreach($urls as $k=>$url){
  // this could potentially take 0-30 seconds each
  // (more or less depending on connection, target site, timeout settings...)
  if( ! isValidUrl($url) ){
    unset($urls[$k]);
  }
}

echo "yay all done! now show my site";
foreach($urls as $url){
  echo "<a href=\"{$url}\">{$url}</a><br/>";
}

The functions below could be helpfull, you probably want to modify them to suit your needs:

    function isValidUrl($url){
        // first do some quick sanity checks:
        if(!$url || !is_string($url)){
            return false;
        }
        // quick check url is roughly a valid http request: ( http://blah/... ) 
        if( ! preg_match('/^http(s)?:\/\/[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?(\/.*)?$/i', $url) ){
            return false;
        }
        // the next bit could be slow:
        if(getHttpResponseCode_using_curl($url) != 200){
//      if(getHttpResponseCode_using_getheaders($url) != 200){  // use this one if you cant use curl
            return false;
        }
        // all good!
        return true;
    }

    function getHttpResponseCode_using_curl($url, $followredirects = true){
        // returns int responsecode, or false (if url does not exist or connection timeout occurs)
        // NOTE: could potentially take up to 0-30 seconds , blocking further code execution (more or less depending on connection, target site, and local timeout settings))
        // if $followredirects == false: return the FIRST known httpcode (ignore redirects)
        // if $followredirects == true : return the LAST  known httpcode (when redirected)
        if(! $url || ! is_string($url)){
            return false;
        }
        $ch = @curl_init($url);
        if($ch === false){
            return false;
        }
        @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER         ,true);    // we want headers
        @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY         ,true);    // dont need body
        @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER ,true);    // catch output (do NOT print!)
        if($followredirects){
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION ,true);
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      ,10);  // fairly random number, but could prevent unwanted endless redirects with followlocation=true
        }else{
            @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION ,false);
        }
//      @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT ,5);   // fairly random number (seconds)... but could prevent waiting forever to get a result
//      @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        ,6);   // fairly random number (seconds)... but could prevent waiting forever to get a result
//      @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT      ,"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1");   // pretend we're a regular browser
        @curl_exec($ch);
        if(@curl_errno($ch)){   // should be 0
            @curl_close($ch);
            return false;
        }
        $code = @curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); // note: php.net documentation shows this returns a string, but really it returns an int
        @curl_close($ch);
        return $code;
    }

    function getHttpResponseCode_using_getheaders($url, $followredirects = true){
        // returns string responsecode, or false if no responsecode found in headers (or url does not exist)
        // NOTE: could potentially take up to 0-30 seconds , blocking further code execution (more or less depending on connection, target site, and local timeout settings))
        // if $followredirects == false: return the FIRST known httpcode (ignore redirects)
        // if $followredirects == true : return the LAST  known httpcode (when redirected)
        if(! $url || ! is_string($url)){
            return false;
        }
        $headers = @get_headers($url);
        if($headers && is_array($headers)){
            if($followredirects){
                // we want the the last errorcode, reverse array so we start at the end:
                $headers = array_reverse($headers);
            }
            foreach($headers as $hline){
                // search for things like "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" , "HTTP/1.0 200 OK" , "HTTP/1.1 301 PERMANENTLY MOVED" , "HTTP/1.1 400 Not Found" , etc.
                // note that the exact syntax/version/output differs, so there is some string magic involved here
                if(preg_match('/^HTTP\/\S+\s+([1-9][0-9][0-9])\s+.*/', $hline, $matches) ){// "HTTP/*** ### ***"
                    $code = $matches[1];
                    return $code;
                }
            }
            // no HTTP/xxx found in headers:
            return false;
        }
        // no headers :
        return false;
    }

Answer 4

All above solutions + extra sugar. (Ultimate AIO solution)

/**
 * Check that given URL is valid and exists.
 * @param string $url URL to check
 * @return bool TRUE when valid | FALSE anyway
 */
function urlExists ( $url ) {
    // Remove all illegal characters from a url
    $url = filter_var($url, FILTER_SANITIZE_URL);

    // Validate URI
    if (filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL) === FALSE
        // check only for http/https schemes.
        || !in_array(strtolower(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_SCHEME)), ['http','https'], true )
    ) {
        return false;
    }

    // Check that URL exists
    $file_headers = @get_headers($url);
    return !(!$file_headers || $file_headers[0] === 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found');
}

Example:

var_dump ( urlExists('http://stackoverflow.com/') );
// Output: true;

Answer 5

One thing to take into consideration when you check the header for a 404 is the case where a site does not generate a 404 immediately.

A lot of sites check whether a page exists or not in the PHP/ASP (et cetera) source and forward you to a 404 page. In those cases the header is basically extended by the header of the 404 that is generated. In those cases the 404 error not in the first line of the header, but the tenth.

$array = get_headers($url);
$string = $array[0];
print_r($string) // would generate:

Array ( 
[0] => HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently 
[1] => Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2018 16:12:29 GMT 
[2] => Server: Apache/2.4.34 (FreeBSD) LibreSSL/2.7.4 PHP/7.0.31 
[3] => X-Powered-By: PHP/7.0.31 
[4] => Set-Cookie: landing=%2Freed-diffuser-fig-pudding-50; path=/; HttpOnly 
[5] => Location: /reed-diffuser-fig-pudding-50/ 
[6] => Content-Length: 0 
[7] => Connection: close 
[8] => Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 
[9] => HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found 
[10] => Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2018 16:12:29 GMT 
[11] => Server: Apache/2.4.34 (FreeBSD) LibreSSL/2.7.4 PHP/7.0.31 
[12] => X-Powered-By: PHP/7.0.31 
[13] => Set-Cookie: landing=%2Freed-diffuser-fig-pudding-50%2F; path=/; HttpOnly 
[14] => Connection: close 
[15] => Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 
) 

Answer 6

Here:

$file = 'http://www.domain.com/somefile.jpg';
$file_headers = @get_headers($file);
if(!$file_headers || $file_headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found') {
    $exists = false;
}
else {
    $exists = true;
}

From here and right below the above post, there's a curl solution:

function url_exists($url) {
    if (!$fp = curl_init($url)) return false;
    return true;
}