Broken dead links checker php solution

If you want to know how to check for broken or dead links using php, following is a simple script that uses curl to check broken links, you can run it on your database if you have a table of links that you want to check for possible broken links:


            $ch = curl_init();
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, FALSE);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
            $data = curl_exec($ch);
            curl_close($ch);

This sets nobody=true which means it doesn't request for the whole page hence speeding up the link checking. There are plenty of ways within curl to check for broken or redirecting links, I personally use this by putting a simple length check on data variable, if its 0 then it means the link is dead.

i.e.
if(strlen($data)==0)
   echo 'dead link=>'.$url;

You can do something else if you like.

Cheers.