How to detect link that's down?

[zzz]

Hi,

I have a page that lists a number of external links. I would like to figure out a way to be allerted if a particular link goes down, like the site is down of the owner have changed the link all together. Currently I was trying to use the following script, but sometimes it shows that the link is down when it is actually not.

$link = $mylink; 
$livelink = @fsockopen($link, 80, &$errno, &$errstr, 30); 
	 if(!$livelink) { 				
	        echo "Link is down"; 
	} 
	else { 
	        echo "Link is OK"; 
	}

What is a good way of going about about this task?

[ZibingsCoder]

Why don't you look into using the CURL library to test the link. Don't have much experience with it personally, but I would think that'd be a good way of gauging the link's validity.

[zapa]

Sometmes i just look around allday for snippet that could come in use latter on and add them to a Snippet in dreamweaver so try cehckotu some script sites in you free time too 🙂

this will work if you edit to you needed:

<? 
/** 
* check_link() 
* code by J. Waite 2003 
* 
* Checks the URL and reports back the HTTP response code like: "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" 
* Or "Failed" if URL doesn't connect. 
* 
*   example: 
*   echo check_link("www.php.net"); 
* 
* @param string $url 
* @return string $output 
**/ 
function check_link($url) 
{ 
    // set the output variable 
    $output = ""; 
    // convert the url to lower case 
    $url = strtolower($url); 

// check if the url is an ftp and remove "ftp://" 
if (strstr($url, "ftp://") || strstr($url, "ftp.")) { 
    $url = str_replace("ftp://", "", $url); 
    // seperate the url by the slash 
    $url = explode("/", $url); 
    // use only the first occurance of url after seperation. 
    // open a connection to the url 
       if ($fp = ftp_connect($url[0])) { 
        // close the connection 
        ftp_close($fp); 
        $output = "FTP connection valid"; 
    } else { 
        $output = "Failed"; 
    } 
// url is not an ftp link. 
} else { 
    // add "http://" if its missing. 
    $url = (strstr($url, "http://")) ? $url : "http://" . $url; 
    // open a connection to the url. 
    if ($fp = @fopen($url,"r")) { 
        // if php version is newer then 4.3.0 do socket_get_status. 
        if (version_compare(phpversion(), '4.3.0') > 0) { 
            $socket = socket_get_status($fp); 
            // return just the http response code. 
            $output = $socket['wrapper_data'][0]; 
        } else { 
            // older php version 
            $output = "Connection is valid"; 
        } 
        // close the connection 
        fclose($fp); 
    } else { 
        $output = "Failed"; 
    } 
} 
// return output status. 
return $output; 
} 
?>