what do i have wrong

Il-Belti

i am trying to check if a website exists, and if not i would like to redirect to an alternative page. I have tried the following 2 pieces of code, but none of them worked fine. Could someone tell me what do i have wrong please ?

Example 1:

<?php
$filename = "http://www.yahoo.com";
$alternative = "http://www.access-programmers.co.uk";

if ( file_exists($filename))
{
fopen($filename, "r");
}
else
{
fopen($alternative, "r");
}
?>

Example2:

<?php
$filename = "http://www.yahoo.com";
$alternative = "http://www.access-programmers.co.uk";

if ( file_exists($filename))
{
Header("Location: $filename");
}
else
{
Header("Location: $alternative");
}
?>

Thank you for any guidance.

Weedpacket

What happens instead? What version of PHP are you using (I ask this because of the note on the [man]file_exists[/man] manual page)?

Il-Belti

i am using php 5.1 build 2600

i am using IIS as webserver, and when in the address bar of IE, i type http://localhost/process.php, it is redirecting to the access website, when in reality it should go to yahoo, since that website exists.

any further help is appreciated.

Weedpacket

[man]file_exists[/man]
Refer to Appendix L for a listing of which wrappers support stat() family of functionality.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/wrappers.http.php
Attribute Supported
Supports stat() No

That could be your problem. If you want the page, just try requesting it. The HTTP wrapper is smart enough to know what failures look like.

$filename = "http://www.whoistheidiotwhoregisteredinvalid.com/";
//$filename = "http://www.yahoo.com/";
$alternate = "http://www.access-programmers.co.uk";

if($page = @file_get_contents($filename))
	echo "$filename exists: ",substr($page,0,500);
else
	$page = @file_get_contents($alternate);
	echo "Using $alternate instead: ",substr($page,0,500);

If you just want to see if it's there, fopen it instead. If you want to get fancy, use fsockopen() and write a HEAD request and parse the first line of the response. Of course, this assumes you have enough of a grip on The HTTP Protocol to know which responses indicate the the file (and host!) exist or not.