Is there a faster way to check if an external web page exists?

Question

I wrote this method to check if a page exists or not:

protected bool PageExists(string url)
{
try
    {
        Uri u = new Uri(url);
        WebRequest w = WebR         


        

Answer 1

I think your approach is rather good, but would change it into only downloading the headers by adding w.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Head; before calling GetResponse.

This could do it:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.example.com");
request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Head;
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
bool pageExists = response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK;

You may probably want to check for other status codes as well.