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

A radical solution would be to display the favicons as background images in a div above your default icon. That way, all overhead would be placed on the client while still not displaying broken images (missing background images are ignored in all browsers AFAIK).

Answer 2

function remote_file_exists($url){
   return(bool)preg_match('~HTTP/1\.\d\s+200\s+OK~', @current(get_headers($url)));
}  
$ff = "http://www.emeditor.com/pub/emed32_11.0.5.exe";
    if(remote_file_exists($ff)){
        echo "file exist!";
    }
    else{
        echo "file not exist!!!";
    }

Answer 3

This works for me to check if a remote file exist in PHP:

$url = 'https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/stackoverflow/img/favicon.ico';
    $header_response = get_headers($url, 1);

    if ( strpos( $header_response[0], "404" ) !== false ) {
        echo 'File does NOT exist';
        } else {
        echo 'File exists';
        }

Answer 4

PHP's inbuilt functions may not work for checking URL if allow_url_fopen setting is set to off for security reasons. Curl is a better option as we would not need to change our code at later stage. Below is the code I used to verify a valid URL:

$url = str_replace(' ', '%20', $url);
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);  
curl_close($ch);
if($httpcode>=200 && $httpcode<300){  return true; } else { return false; } 

Kindly note the CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER option which also verify the URL's starting with HTTPS.