Verifying links/urls

[Anon]

I have a databse with links for my web-directory, currently it holds about 300 urls.

Unfortunately some of theese links dies out, either because the site gets deleted or some other reason.

At the moment i have to manually go and delete the ones i find not working, but the job is getting harder and harder as more links are added.

Therefor i have tried to make a script that will check the url and delete it if a connection cannot be made to the url.

it is something like this:

... loop start ...
if (!@fopen($url,"r")) {
mysql_query("delete.......");
}
... loop end ...

But this takes QUITE a while. So i was wondering if there is a better/quicker way to check my db

regards
Simon

[[deleted]]

A faster way might be to fsockopen instead of fopen, so you can send the HEAD command instead of the GET command. HEAD fetches only the header of the page, which is only a few lines. Fopen gets the whole page, which can be 50 or more Kbytes.
Plus, fsockopen lets you get the status of the page easily (first line returned by your HEAD request)

Search the net for the HTTP RFC, that will tell you how to build a HEAD request.
There's more than enough info in the manual to get you going with fsockopen.