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

If the file is not hosted external you might translate the remote URL to an absolute Path on your webserver. That way you don't have to call CURL or file_get_contents, etc.

function remoteFileExists($url) {

    $root = realpath($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]);
    $urlParts = parse_url( $url );

    if ( !isset( $urlParts['path'] ) )
        return false;

    if ( is_file( $root . $urlParts['path'] ) )
        return true;
    else
        return false;

}

remoteFileExists( 'https://www.yourdomain.com/path/to/remote/image.png' );

Note: Your webserver must populate DOCUMENT_ROOT to use this function