Easy way to test a URL for 404 in PHP?

Question

I'm teaching myself some basic scraping and I've found that sometimes the URL's that I feed into my code return 404, which gums up all the rest of my code.

So I need a test at the top of the code to check if the URL returns 404 or not.

This would seem like a pretty straightfoward task, but Google's not giving me any answers. I worry I'm searching for the wrong stuff.

One blog recommended I use this:

$valid = @fsockopen($url, 80, $errno, $errstr, 30);

and then test to see if $valid if empty or not.

But I think the URL that's giving me problems has a redirect on it, so $valid is coming up empty for all values. Or perhaps I'm doing something else wrong.

I've also looked into a "head request" but I've yet to find any actual code examples I can play with or try out.

Suggestions? And what's this about curl?

Answer 1

This will give you true if url does not return 200 OK

function check_404($url) {
   $headers=get_headers($url, 1);
   if ($headers[0]!='HTTP/1.1 200 OK') return true; else return false;
}

Answer 2

As an additional hint to the great accepted answer:

When using a variation of the proposed solution, I got errors because of php setting 'max_execution_time'. So what I did was the following:

set_time_limit(120);
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
set_time_limit(ini_get('max_execution_time'));
curl_close($curl);

First I set the time limit to a higher number of seconds, in the end I set it back to the value defined in the php settings.

Answer 3

Here is a short solution.

$handle = curl_init($uri);
curl_setopt($handle,  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($handle,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,array ("Accept: application/rdf+xml"));
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_exec($handle);
$httpCode = curl_getinfo($handle, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
if($httpCode == 200||$httpCode == 303) 
{
    echo "you might get a reply";
}
curl_close($handle);

In your case, you can change application/rdf+xml to whatever you use.

Answer 4

If your running php5 you can use:

$url = 'http://www.example.com';
print_r(get_headers($url, 1));

Alternatively with php4 a user has contributed the following:

/**
This is a modified version of code from "stuart at sixletterwords dot com", at 14-Sep-2005 04:52. This version tries to emulate get_headers() function at PHP4. I think it works fairly well, and is simple. It is not the best emulation available, but it works.

Features:
- supports (and requires) full URLs.
- supports changing of default port in URL.
- stops downloading from socket as soon as end-of-headers is detected.

Limitations:
- only gets the root URL (see line with "GET / HTTP/1.1").
- don't support HTTPS (nor the default HTTPS port).
*/

if(!function_exists('get_headers'))
{
    function get_headers($url,$format=0)
    {
        $url=parse_url($url);
        $end = "\r\n\r\n";
        $fp = fsockopen($url['host'], (empty($url['port'])?80:$url['port']), $errno, $errstr, 30);
        if ($fp)
        {
            $out  = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\n";
            $out .= "Host: ".$url['host']."\r\n";
            $out .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
            $var  = '';
            fwrite($fp, $out);
            while (!feof($fp))
            {
                $var.=fgets($fp, 1280);
                if(strpos($var,$end))
                    break;
            }
            fclose($fp);

            $var=preg_replace("/\r\n\r\n.*\$/",'',$var);
            $var=explode("\r\n",$var);
            if($format)
            {
                foreach($var as $i)
                {
                    if(preg_match('/^([a-zA-Z -]+): +(.*)$/',$i,$parts))
                        $v[$parts[1]]=$parts[2];
                }
                return $v;
            }
            else
                return $var;
        }
    }
}

Both would have a result similar to:

Array
(
    [0] => HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    [Date] => Sat, 29 May 2004 12:28:14 GMT
    [Server] => Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux)
    [Last-Modified] => Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:11:55 GMT
    [ETag] => "3f80f-1b6-3e1cb03b"
    [Accept-Ranges] => bytes
    [Content-Length] => 438
    [Connection] => close
    [Content-Type] => text/html
)

Therefore you could just check to see that the header response was OK eg:

$headers = get_headers($url, 1);
if ($headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK') {
//valid 
}

if ($headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently') {
//moved or redirect page
}

W3C Codes and Definitions

Answer 5

With strager's code, you can also check the CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE for other codes. Some websites do not report a 404, rather they simply redirect to a custom 404 page and return 302 (redirect) or something similar. I used this to check if an actual file (eg. robots.txt) existed on the server or not. Clearly this kind of file would not cause a redirect if it existed, but if it didn't it would redirect to a 404 page, which as I said before may not have a 404 code.

function is_404($url) {
    $handle = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($handle,  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);

    /* Get the HTML or whatever is linked in $url. */
    $response = curl_exec($handle);

    /* Check for 404 (file not found). */
    $httpCode = curl_getinfo($handle, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    curl_close($handle);

    /* If the document has loaded successfully without any redirection or error */
    if ($httpCode >= 200 && $httpCode < 300) {
        return false;
    } else {
        return true;
    }
}

Answer 6

<?php

$url= 'www.something.com';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);   
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);    
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.4");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "gzip");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);


echo $httpcode;
?>