getting HTTP headers

[Anon]

hi guys, check this mama out. getting a page's headers. i've tried the code posted by on www.php.net [e-mail] on 27-Aug-1999 [at the bottom of this post]...there seems to be a really nasty problem. i want to check downloads before they offered to the user. ie. get the download header and check whether it's a 404 Not Found. it appears some sites (eg. www.fortunecity.com, www.cybercities.com) auto redirect 404s to their home page or something similar, which has a totally different header...this causes the function to return the download to be found when it should not be. however checking the header using telnet (telnet www.fortuncity.com 80, then typing HEAD /download.zip HTTP/1.0\n\n) returns a 404 at correct times.........HELP!!!!!

function get_headers($host, $path)
{
$fp = fsockopen ("$host", 80, &$errnr, &$errstr) or die("$errno: $errstr");

fputs($fp,"GET $path HTTP/1.0\n\n");

while (!$end)
{
$line = fgets($fp, 2048);

if (trim($line) == "") $end = true;

else echo $line;
}

fclose($fp);
}

[pnoeric]

Jonathan - I know it's been a long time but I just found your message and I've been experimenting with this stuff. You're actually getting an HTTP 302 error from fortunecity.com, which is the "temporarily moved" (redirect) header. The "Location:" in the header points to you their 404 page. Most browsers hide 302 pages completely: they see it and immediately move on to the "Location:" without any message or note.

For your purposes (verifying a file exists at a certain location) it seems like either error code would be considered "no file to get here."

Hope this helps!

best,
Eric Mueller