How can one check to see if a remote file exists using PHP?

Question

The best I could find, an if fclose fopen type thing, makes the page load really slowly.

Basically what I\'m trying to do is

Answer 1

As Pies say you can use cURL. You can get cURL to only give you the headers, and not the body, which might make it faster. A bad domain could always take a while because you will be waiting for the request to time-out; you could probably change the timeout length using cURL.

Here is example:

function remoteFileExists($url) {
    $curl = curl_init($url);

    //don't fetch the actual page, you only want to check the connection is ok
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);

    //do request
    $result = curl_exec($curl);

    $ret = false;

    //if request did not fail
    if ($result !== false) {
        //if request was ok, check response code
        $statusCode = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);  

        if ($statusCode == 200) {
            $ret = true;   
        }
    }

    curl_close($curl);

    return $ret;
}

$exists = remoteFileExists('http://stackoverflow.com/favicon.ico');
if ($exists) {
    echo 'file exists';
} else {
    echo 'file does not exist';   
}