connecting to remote files

Anon

I use a .php script to extract .html from a file located on a remote server.

I want however to protect my site from any delays if the remote server is either (a) very slow or (b) the particular file is not available. I want to do this by displaying a message that the file is unavailable.

file_exists() does not work on remote files and set_time_limit() to abort the script
also does not seem to work as the connection timesout after about 3 minutes, which is way too long.

Any ideas how to detect (a) if the file exists and (b) to abort the connection if it
is too slow.

Many thanks
Sig

Anon

Detecting if the file exists can only be done with either open() or fsockopen() and pumping a GET into the socket. But if the remote host is down this is of no use ofcourse. You can set the conneciton timeout as the last option of fsockopen(), but this is not available on every platform.