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

You can use the filesystem: use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Filesystem; use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Exception\IOExceptionInterface;

and check $fileSystem = new Filesystem(); if ($fileSystem->exists('path_to_file')==true) {...

Answer 2

if (false === file_get_contents("http://example.com/path/to/image")) {
    $image = $default_image;
}

Should work ;)

Answer 3

all the answers here that use get_headers() are doing a GET request. It's much faster/cheaper to just do a HEAD request.

To make sure that get_headers() does a HEAD request instead of a GET you should add this:

stream_context_set_default(
    array(
        'http' => array(
            'method' => 'HEAD'
        )
    )
);

so to check if a file exists, your code would look something like this:

stream_context_set_default(
    array(
        'http' => array(
            'method' => 'HEAD'
        )
    )
);
$headers = get_headers('http://website.com/dir/file.jpg', 1);
$file_found = stristr($headers[0], '200');

$file_found will return either false or true, obviously.

Answer 4

CoolGoose's solution is good but this is faster for large files (as it only tries to read 1 byte):

if (false === file_get_contents("http://example.com/path/to/image",0,null,0,1)) {
    $image = $default_image;
}

Answer 5

This can be done by obtaining the HTTP Status code (404 = not found) which is possible with file_get_contentsDocs making use of context options. The following code takes redirects into account and will return the status code of the final destination (Demo):

$url = 'http://example.com/';
$code = FALSE;

$options['http'] = array(
    'method' => "HEAD",
    'ignore_errors' => 1
);

$body = file_get_contents($url, NULL, stream_context_create($options));

foreach($http_response_header as $header)
    sscanf($header, 'HTTP/%*d.%*d %d', $code);

echo "Status code: $code";

If you don't want to follow redirects, you can do it similar (Demo):

$url = 'http://example.com/';
$code = FALSE;

$options['http'] = array(
    'method' => "HEAD",
    'ignore_errors' => 1,
    'max_redirects' => 0
);

$body = file_get_contents($url, NULL, stream_context_create($options));

sscanf($http_response_header[0], 'HTTP/%*d.%*d %d', $code);

echo "Status code: $code";

Some of the functions, options and variables in use are explained with more detail on a blog post I've written: HEAD first with PHP Streams.

Answer 6

To check for the existence of images, exif_imagetype should be preferred over getimagesize, as it is much faster.

To suppress the E_NOTICE, just prepend the error control operator (@).

if (@exif_imagetype($filename)) {
  // Image exist
}

As a bonus, with the returned value (IMAGETYPE_XXX) from exif_imagetype we could also get the mime-type or file-extension with image_type_to_mime_type / image_type_to_extension.