note 28222 added to function.file-exists

Re the function url_exists posted by conny at glidecom dot se in Feb 2002 This is a nice beginning but it can be improved. Most important it is not very friendly to the internet to ask for a 20Mb file when you only want the header. OK you only read the first 1024 bytes, but do you know how much of the file is being sent by the far end before you do a close? It is better to replace GET with HEAD. This gives you exactly the same headers as a GET, but does not try to send you the actual file. Much less important the documentation says to prefer preg_ functions to ereg functions. Here is my coding based on Conny's original idea. Many thanks to Conny for starting me off. Function url_header returns the headers for that url, and url_exists is true if exists and false otherwise. function url_header($url) { $url = preg_replace('#^http:#i', '', $url); if (preg_match('#^//#', $url)){ list(,,$domain, $file) = explode('/', $url, 4); $file = "/$file"; } else { $file = $url; if (! preg_match('#^/#', $file)) $file = "/$file"; $domain = $_SERVER[HTTP_HOST]; } $fid = fsockopen($domain, 80); if (! $fid) return "Host not responding"; fputs($fid, "HEAD $file HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: $domain\r\n\r\n"); $head = fread($fid, 4096); fclose($fid); echo "<br>\n<pre>\n$head<pre>"; return $head; } function url_exists($url) { return preg_match('#^HTTP/.*\s+200\sOK\s#i', url_header($url)); } happy new year everyone! River~~ -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-exists.php http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+28222 http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+28222 http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+28222