Will file_get_contents fail gracefully?

Question

I need file_get_contents to be fault tolerant, as in, if the $url fed to it returns a 404, to tell me about it before it echos out a warning. C

Answer 1

You could do an additional (HEAD) request to find out first, for instance

$response = get_headers($url);
if($response[1] === 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK') {
    $content = file_get_contents($url);
}

Or you can tell file_get_contents to ignore any errors and force-fetch the result of the $url by modifying the stream context:

echo file_get_contents(
    'http://www.example.com/foo.html',
    FALSE,
    stream_context_create(array('http'=>array('ignore_errors' => TRUE)))
)