How to find out if a file exists on a remote / local server? file_exists(), fopen()?

[chromis]

Hi there,

This has probably been asked a million times but having looked through the PHP manual for the file_exists() function I can't seem to get the right code for what I want to do.

I have a typical scenario of wanting to check for an image files existence before displaying, I have foubd the following code to do this but it always returns false:

$imageURL = "http://website.com/images/image1.jpg";
 
$handle = @fopen($imageURL, 'r');
if ($handle===false) { 
  echo "image does not exist";
}
else {
  echo "image exists";
  fclose($handle);
}
 

What is the best way to find out if an image exists on a remote or local server?

Thanks,

Chromis

[abhishektiwari]

hi Chromis,

PHP file_exists() function takes file system path. as an argument.

[chromis]

hi Chromis,

PHP file_exists() function takes file system path. as an argument.

Hi abhishektiwari,

Thanks for the reply, I wish to check if a file exists using an http address, i am thinking file_exists() is not the right function to use, what function should I use?

Thanks,

Chromis

[nomad]

Hi abhishektiwari,

Thanks for the reply, I wish to check if a file exists using an http address, i am thinking file_exists() is not the right function to use, what function should I use?

Thanks,

Chromis

yes you can use file_exist

might look something like this


if (file_exists("test.txt")) {
echo "test.txt is a file!";
}


nomad

[Markus]

Hi there,

This has probably been asked a million times but having looked through the PHP manual for the file_exists() function I can't seem to get the right code for what I want to do.

I have a typical scenario of wanting to check for an image files existence before displaying, I have foubd the following code to do this but it always returns false:

$imageURL = "http://website.com/images/image1.jpg";
 
$handle = @fopen($imageURL, 'r');
if ($handle===false) { 
  echo "image does not exist";
}
else {
  echo "image exists";
  fclose($handle);
}
 

What is the best way to find out if an image exists on a remote or local server?

Thanks,

Chromis

file_exists() is perfect to use! Is it not obvious? You're wanting to check if a file exists ... file_exists?

;)

[chromis]

file_exists() is perfect to use! Is it not obvious? You're wanting to check if a file exists ... file_exists?

;)

Yeah it's completely obvious but what is perhaps not so obvious in my explanation is that I want to find out whether a file at a specific URL exists. file_exists() in PHP 5 does not accept URLs only local path names.

Having tryed a number of different solutions only this one worked for me:

    function url_exists($url){
        $url = str_replace("http://", "", $url);
        if (strstr($url, "/")) {
            $url = explode("/", $url, 2);
            $url[1] = "/".$url[1];
        } else {
            $url = array($url, "/");
        }
 
        $fh = fsockopen($url[0], 80);
        if ($fh) {
            fputs($fh,"GET ".$url[1]." HTTP/1.1\nHost:".$url[0]."\n\n");
            if (fread($fh, 22) == "HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found") { return FALSE; }
            else { return TRUE;    }
 
        } else { return FALSE;}
    }    
 

Thanks for your input though,

Chromis