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; } }