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

This is not an answer to your original question, but a better way of doing what you're trying to do:

Instead of actually trying to get the site's favicon directly (which is a royal pain given it could be /favicon.png, /favicon.ico, /favicon.gif, or even /path/to/favicon.png), use google:

Done.