Question

I’ve got this little CMS thing going, and the user has the ability to preview the post before submitting. I’d like to have a feature that checks whether a URL entered is valid (I.E. points to a resource that exists, not whether it’s in the correct format or not). Preferably, I’d like to do it with JavaScript (I don’t have to use AJAX and PHP then), but PHP is fine.

Can someone point me towards a way of doing this? Just in case, I want a yes/no response from something like running the UNIX ping command. I don’t care about what’s at the other end of the URL, just whether it actually points to something navigable.

Thanks,

James

Answer 1

you could simply use fopen to see if the url will work … of course, this could be resource overkill depending on how often you are doing it.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php

Alternately, you can use a jquery plugin:

http://binarykitten.me.uk/dev/jq-plugins/88-jquery-plugin-ajax-head-request.html

An alternate, and probably the easiest way which isn’t live … but you can use jquery to call another php script that implements it:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-headers.php