Question

currently i am using following function

function urlExist($url)
{
                $handle   = curl_init($url);
                if (false === $handle)
                {
                        return false;
                }
                curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
                curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);  // this works
                curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15") ); // request as if Firefox
                curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
                curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, false);
                $connectable = curl_exec($handle);
                ##print $connectable;
                curl_close($handle);
                return $connectable;
}

It works fine for simple url but does not work for url that redirects to another domain

Answer 1

You need to setFOLLOWLOCATION:

curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

However, there is no point in issuing a GET request here. A simple HEAD is lighter since only headers are transferred. To do that, set NOBODY to true:

curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);