[RESOLVED] Verify External Link

snappy

Hi All

I would like to know if there is a way to verify that a link has been placed on a specific page of an external website.

Say I have index page url :

http://www.domain.net/index.html

and link page url

http://www.domain.net/links.html

is there a way to check if there is a linkk to http://www.domain.net/links.html from http://www.domain.net/index.html.

Any suggestions will be appreciated

justsomeone

you can open the remote page using fopen() , or curl , or some other method.

Then you can read in the entire conents of the remote page and search through it using strstr()

snappy

Does this look correct ?

<?
$index = fopen("http://www.domain.net/index.html/", "r");
if (!stristr('http://www.domain.net/links.html'){
  exho"No link found";
}
?>

justsomeone

Nope.

You've only opened the file, you haven't actually read it into any variable.

Also you haven't told stristr where to search for the string you want to find.

Did you read those manual pages?

Try:

<?php
function searchpage($remotePage, $searchString) {
       $fp = fopen($remotePage, 'r');
       if ($fp===false ) {
       // error reading or opening file
           return false;
       }
       $contents = fread($fp, 9999999);
       fclose($fp);
       if (stristr($contents, $searchString){
           return TRUE;
       }else{
           return FALSE;
       }
}
?>

This function reads in the contents of the remote page and searches it for the string you want to find. I'm afraid I don't have access to a PHP enviornment here, so I can't test it. It probably needs some debugging, but it should get you well on the way.

As a learning exercise for you, you might want to change it to read the remote file line by line instead of reading the whole thing in in one go. This will make it faster and more memory efficient.

Note, to use fopen to open a remote web page, your PHP will ned to be configured accordingly... see the manual for further detail

snappy

Thank you very much I will try this

MarkR

Rather than just looking for your URL on a page, you might want to check that they actually have an anchor with it in.

You can do this (in PHP5) by using the HTML parser and then searching for anchor elements and reading the URLs out of the href attribute.

Sort of partial code snippet... (copied from something I wrote)

$document = new DOMDocument;
$document->loadHTML($html); // Pay close attention to warnings/errors happening here.
$anchors = $document->getElementsByTagName("a");
foreach ($anchors as $node) {
                $href = $node->getAttribute("href");
 // Perform check here
}

Mark

snappy

Thanks MarkR