CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphyperlink
Mordak
Mordak

Reputation: 19

Using PHP to Detect All Links (Including those that don't go to a file)

I'm trying to detect broken links. The following PHP accessing a MySQL table seems to work great (but slow due to fopen) for almost everything:

function fileExists($path){    
    return (@fopen($path,"r")==true); 
}
$status="";
$result = mysql_query(" SELECT id, title, link from table ");  
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    $id=$row{'id'};
    $title=$row{'title'};
    $link1=$row{'link1'};
    etc.   
    if ($link){
        if (fileExists($link)!=TRUE) {
            $status='BROKEN_LINK';  
        }
    }
    //Here do something if the status gets set to broken
}

BUT the problem is links like this:

torrentfreak.com/unblocking-the-pirate-bay-the-hard-way-is-fun-for-geeks-120506

Here it isn't going to a file but going somewhere and getting content. So what is the best way to actually detect these situations correctly when they are not on your own domain?

Thanks!

Mordak

Upvotes: 1

Views: 107

Answers (1)

Stegrex
Stegrex

Reputation: 4024

You can try using the cURL method:

function fileExists(&$pageScrape, $path){ // Adding parameter of cURL resource as a pointer.
    curl_setopt($pageScrape, CURLOPT_URL, $path); // Set URL path.
    curl_setopt($pageScrape, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); // Don't output the scraped page directly.
    curl_exec($pageScrape); // Execute cURL call.
    $status = curl_getinfo($pageScrape, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); // Get the HTTP status code of the page, load into variable $status.
    if ($status >= 200 && $status <= 299) { // Checking for the page success.
        return true; 
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

$pageScrape = curl_init();

$status="";
$result = mysql_query(" SELECT id, title, link from table ");  
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    $id=$row{'id'};
    $title=$row{'title'};
    $link1=$row{'link1'};
    etc.   
    if ($link){
        if (fileExists($pageScrape, $link)!=TRUE) {
            $status='BROKEN_LINK';  
        }
    }
    //Here do something if the status gets set to broken
}
curl_close($pageScrape);

You can fine tune the status check by looking over the list of HTTP status codes: Wikipedia link

Upvotes: 1

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