Can php check links?

[dodozhang21]

Hi, I tried to search and couldn't find topics specifically to my answer, if you knew a topic that answers my question, please direct me to it.

i'm wondering if php has the ability to check for a link to see if it's down or not. for example, i have this bookmark script and collected over 100 links, many of them are now dead links. i was wondering if there's anyway i can make php check each of the links and remove the dead links.

have any ideas?

Thanks

[Anon]

if (fopen ("$URL_of_link", "r"))
{
// keep link
}
else
{
// remove the link
}

note: If you are going to process lots of these, you might need to increase the maximum time that a PHP script runs. 30 seconds may be too short to check more that 2 or 3 links if they don't work.