Question

how to check if a URL exists or not – error 404 ? (using php)

<?php
$url = "http://www.faressoft.org/";
?>

Answer 1

If you have allow_url_fopen, you can do:

$exists = ($fp = fopen("http://www.faressoft.org/", "r")) !== FALSE;
if ($fp) fclose($fp);

although strictly speaking, this won’t return false only for 404 errors. It’s possible to use stream contexts to get that information, but a better option is to use the curl extension:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.example.com/notfound");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_exec($ch);
$is404 = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE) == 404;
curl_close($ch);