PHP: Check if a URL exists with cURL

In my previous post about email validation one user pointed out that this will not actually validate if a website’s domain actually exists. Here is a simple function that will do just that, determine if a website exists using PHP and cURL.

Edit: After searching a bit, I found another similar cURL solution that checks the actual headers. Since cURL can return HTTP code I don’t think all that extra code is necessary? I could be wrong!

function urlExists($url=NULL)
	{
		if($url == NULL) return false;
		$ch = curl_init($url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
		$data = curl_exec($ch);
		$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
		curl_close($ch); 
		if($httpcode>=200 && $httpcode<300){
			return true;
		} else {
			return false;
		}
	}