fopen to test valid URL

devinemke

i have a form where users can submit URLs. as part of my form validation i am testing them with fopen(). this seems to work fine on my local dev server, but on my live server the validation takes forever and returns false even on URLs that i know to be valid. consider this example:

<?php
$handle = fopen('http://www.phpbuilder.com', 'r');
var_dump($handle);

echo '<br><br>';

$handle = fopen('http://www.devinemke.com', 'r');
var_dump($handle);
?>

on my local server both statements return TRUE. on my live server, the phpbuilder line returns true but the devinemke line (my own domain) always returns false. both servers have allow_url_fopen ON.

any ideas?

thanks.

Stathy

If you have command line access to your production server and it has the perl utility 'GET' try using it :

www.devinemke.com

If your on the same box as your web server could just have problems resolving dns or something like that.

The above code worked on my system.

Weedpacket

You might also consider using [man]fsockopen[/man] and sending a HEAD request (I dunno if fopening() an http: URL means it has to start collecting the response body before it will claim to be "open"); you'll also have a timeout parameter to play with.

To follow Stathy's comment about DNS, you could experiment with [man]gethostbyname[/man] and see if that drags its heels (seeing as that has to do a DNS lookup as well).