Ping / Redirect in PHP

[Phil-man]

Hi:

I need to write some code that will redirect a user to a particular page. I know how to do that, but there's a twist. Here's the order of things:

1) PHP script "pings" a URL to make sure it is available
2) If so, it will redirect to that URL
3) If not, it will redirect to another URL

I wasn't able to find anything about "ping" in the PHP manual. Can anyone help? Thanks!

[freddydoesphp]

Doing a simple fopen should tell you whether the url is valid:

$url = "http://www.yahoo.com";
$fp = @fopen($url, "r");
if ($fp) {
fclose($fp);
header("Location: $url");
}
else {
print "Sorry link is dead";
} 

[Phil-man]

Thanks, that was incredibly easy. Well, except for the fact that I had to view the Source of this page and weed through all the HTML tags to read your code... I noticed that on a few other posts that I've read today. Am I the only one having this problem?

[freddydoesphp]

No, so you can't see the php code on the screen?

[Phil-man]

Nope. All I see is the following:

"Doing a simple fopen should tell you whether the url is valid:







"

(i.e. lots of blank space after your first sentence). Again, I noticed it on a few other posts too, but, as I said, I just viewed the source and got the information that way. It was a little tricky.

Anyway, thanks again.

[DenverDave]

Code shows up on my screen fine. Do you have another browser to try?

Dave

[Phil-man]

I can see the code in IE 5.5 but not in Netscape 4.76. Anyone else using Netscape 4.76? I've only experienced the problem recently. I know SitePoint was redesigned not so long ago...

[DenverDave]

Interesting - I can see the code in both I.E 5.5 and Netscape 3.0 (that I keep around for such things). WindowsME computer. Now if you were using AOL's Netscape 6, I would not be surprised at a problem.

Dave