fopen >> custom 404 issue

I am trying to read in a particular page to a variable. How do you handle if the page is a 404 and then redirects to a custom error page? Am I supposed to use fsockopen and read headers or ?? Ideally I need to pull the end-result page to search for a string in it. Here's the code $handle = fopen("http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=12345678", "rb"); $contents = ""; do { $data = fread($handle, 8192); if (strlen($data)==0) break; $contents .= $data; } while(true); fclose ($handle); Thanks guys .................................... Mike Dunlop AWN, Inc. // www.awn.com [ e ] webmaster@awn.com [ p ] 323.606.4237