Question

I don’t really want to use curl or anything complex like that.
I was looking for a simple way to check if the url (User will enter the url and it is then stored in my MySQL database) is valid and that it is a valid url i.e. the domain exists.
Is fopen a good solution?

Any tutorials or tips on this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

CURL isn’t that complex. To get the http status of a url:

$ch = curl_init('http://www.yahoo.com/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_exec($ch);
$status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
if($status >= 200 && $status < 400) {
    // url is valid
}

A regex or filter would validate that the url is valid but not that it exists. A DNS lookup validates that the domain exists, but not the url.