[RESOLVED] clean and efficient CURL status checker

schwim

Hi there folks!

I wrote myself a nifty youtube function, to check for the existence and legitimacy of the vid_string but mistakenly thought only alphanum was allowed. A few links down the line, I realized my mistake. While searching for the allowed characters, I instead found that you can ping http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/VIDEO_ID and if you get a 200 return, your video string is legit.

So I figured I'd use CURL to handle this in my function.

// Create a curl handle
$ch = curl_init('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/VIDEO_ID');

// Execute
curl_exec($ch);

// Check if any error occurred
if(!curl_errno($ch))
{
 $info = curl_getinfo($ch);

 echo 'We got a code of:' . $info['http_code'];
}

// Close handle
curl_close($ch);

But it's printing the page contents out and all I'm trying to do is check status. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks for your time!

Weedpacket

You'll need to set the RETURNTRANSFER option.

bradgrafelman

For efficiency, you might even consider changing the GET to a HEAD request. (It may end up generating the same amount of work/response if the URL was designed to simply act as a validity checker and doesn't ever contain a non-zero body in the response.)

schwim

bradgrafelman;11043217 wrote:
For efficiency, you might even consider changing the GET to a HEAD request. (It may end up generating the same amount of work/response if the URL was designed to simply act as a validity checker and doesn't ever contain a non-zero body in the response.)

Via

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);

? It looks like how the setopt manual page instructs to make a head-only request.

Thanks!

bradgrafelman

Yes, that appears to be the "right" way to tell cURL to make a HEAD-only transaction (versus directly changing the request type to "HEAD", which may bypass some further internal optimizations).

schwim

I'd like to expand on my code to try to solve another problem if I may, but I'm having a problem figuring out how to do it(or if it can even be done).

I have read that the YT videos that disable embedding use a statement in the header to keep it from being embeddable by 3rd parties. I currently ask the submitter to check to see if it can be embedded by opening up a new window with the embed attempt. I'd really like to have the script handle this , but am having a problem finding any mention of "embed" in the returned code.

It seems that the magic I'm looking for is "X-Frame-Options" being set to "SameOrigin" but I can't find this in any returned code in my curl test:

<?php

function urlStatus($url)
{
	$ch = curl_init($url);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
	curl_exec($ch);
	$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
	curl_close($ch);

return $info;
}

// $url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43129y2paLs';

// $url = 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/43129y2paLs';

$url = 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/43129y2paLs';

$urlafter = urlStatus($url);

print_r($urlafter);

I've tried the URL that you use to view at Youtube, the gdata url for feed purposes and the embed URL that is used in the iFrame. I can't get it to show up anywhere.

I'm testing with a video that is set to disallow embedding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43129y2paLs

Could someone tell me if I can get this value via CURL?

Thanks!

Weedpacket

Looks like you want to set the HEADER option.

schwim

Ahh, I see it!

How might I go about retrieving that snippet from the return to use in my PHP function?

Here's an example of what I got when checking:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 02:05:13 GMT
Server: gwiseguy/2.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-Frame-Options: ALLOWALL
Expires: Tue, 27 Apr 1971 19:44:06 EST
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block; report=https://www.google.com/appserve/security-bugs/log/youtube
P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=151657&hl=en for more info."
Set-Cookie: VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=JaAx5-MR3Ek; path=/; domain=.youtube.com; expires=Sun, 31-May-2015 13:58:13 GMT
Set-Cookie: YSC=NWMYlAoPp4Q; path=/; domain=.youtube.com; httponly
Set-Cookie: VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=JaAx5-MR3Ek; path=/; domain=.youtube.com; expires=Sun, 31-May-2015 13:58:13 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic,p=0.01
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Weedpacket

[man]http_parse_headers[/man]
If you don't have the necessary extensions installed, see the user notes for a PHP implementation.

schwim

Hi there Weed and thanks very much for your help.

I grabbed the function in the user comments and am trying to use it, but I'm only getting a blank array. printing the info from curl, I can see the headers, so I'm pretty sure the problem I'm having is at the new function.

function urlStatus($url)
{
	$ch = curl_init($url);
	// curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
	curl_exec($ch);
	$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
	curl_close($ch);

return $info;
}

function http_parse_headers($headers=false){
    if($headers === false){
        return false;
        }
    $headers = str_replace("\r","",$headers);
    $headers = explode("\n",$headers);
    foreach($headers as $value){
        $header = explode(": ",$value);
        if($header[0] && !$header[1]){
            $headerdata['status'] = $header[0];
            }
        elseif($header[0] && $header[1]){
            $headerdata[$header[0]] = $header[1];
            }
        }
    return $headerdata;
}

// $url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43129y2paLs';

// $url = 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/43129y2paLs';

$url = 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/43129y2paLs';

$headers = urlStatus($url);
$headerInfo = http_parse_headers($headers);
print_r($headerInfo);

Am I simply implementing it incorrectly? I'm suspecting it has something to do with new lines like the submitter talked about, but I'm not savvy enough to figure out if that's right or not.

bradgrafelman

I'm not sure why you're using [man]curl_getinfo/man at all, considering it doesn't give you the headers.

Instead, you'll want to enable CURLOPT_RETURNTANSFER, capture the result of the transfer (returned by [man]curl_exec/man), and return that string output.