If your running php5 you can use:
$url = 'http://www.example.com';
print_r(get_headers($url, 1));
Alternatively with php4 a user has contributed the following:
/**
This is a modified version of code from "stuart at sixletterwords dot com", at 14-Sep-2005 04:52. This version tries to emulate get_headers() function at PHP4. I think it works fairly well, and is simple. It is not the best emulation available, but it works.
Features:
- supports (and requires) full URLs.
- supports changing of default port in URL.
- stops downloading from socket as soon as end-of-headers is detected.
Limitations:
- only gets the root URL (see line with "GET / HTTP/1.1").
- don't support HTTPS (nor the default HTTPS port).
*/
if(!function_exists('get_headers'))
{
function get_headers($url,$format=0)
{
$url=parse_url($url);
$end = "\r\n\r\n";
$fp = fsockopen($url['host'], (empty($url['port'])?80:$url['port']), $errno, $errstr, 30);
if ($fp)
{
$out = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\n";
$out .= "Host: ".$url['host']."\r\n";
$out .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
$var = '';
fwrite($fp, $out);
while (!feof($fp))
{
$var.=fgets($fp, 1280);
if(strpos($var,$end))
break;
}
fclose($fp);
$var=preg_replace("/\r\n\r\n.*\$/",'',$var);
$var=explode("\r\n",$var);
if($format)
{
foreach($var as $i)
{
if(preg_match('/^([a-zA-Z -]+): +(.*)$/',$i,$parts))
$v[$parts[1]]=$parts[2];
}
return $v;
}
else
return $var;
}
}
}
Both would have a result similar to:
Array
(
[0] => HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[Date] => Sat, 29 May 2004 12:28:14 GMT
[Server] => Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux)
[Last-Modified] => Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:11:55 GMT
[ETag] => "3f80f-1b6-3e1cb03b"
[Accept-Ranges] => bytes
[Content-Length] => 438
[Connection] => close
[Content-Type] => text/html
)
Therefore you could just check to see that the header response was OK eg:
$headers = get_headers($url, 1);
if ($headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK') {
//valid
}
if ($headers[0] == 'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently') {
//moved or redirect page
}