Check if favicon.ico exists on a remote server

Hi,

I was wondering if there's a quick way to check to see if the file favicon.ico exists on a remote server.

I was able to check by using cURL to download the header and look for the content type "image/x-icon", but some sites don't show that, such as www.digitalpoint.com/favicon.ico (which prompts you to download the file instead).

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you

 

I would use file_get_contents and search through the file for "shortcut icon" or something like that, then grab that url and use file_exists to see if it exists

 

some sites have the shortcut icon in the <link rel tag, but other sites don't. the favicon.ico is in the root folder. so it's not efficient to do it that way. Thanks for the suggestion anyhow

 

then do a search in the head for <link... and another for a favicon.ico file in the root and compare them

 

Randomly assuming you have PHP 5 and allow_url_fopen enabled in php.ini

function favicon_exists($url)
{
	@extract(@parse_url($url));

	if ($headers = @get_headers($scheme . '://' . $host . (substr(@$path, -1) == '/' ? $path : '/') . 'favicon.ico') AND preg_match('/^HTTP\/1\.\d\s+200/', trim($headers[0])))
	{
		return true;
	}

	return ($content = @file_get_contents($url) AND preg_match('/<link[^>]+rel\s*=\s*["\']?\s*shortcut\s+icon\s*["\']?/i', $content));
}

PHP:

 

unfortunately most hosts don't have allow_url_fopen enabled

 

All hosts I've been on so far had it enabled. However, here a version that tries with cURL if allow_url_fopen is disabled.

function favicon_exists($url)
{
	@extract(@parse_url($url));
	
	$faviconurl = $scheme .'://' . $host . (substr(@$path, -1) == '/' ? $path : '/') . 'favicon.ico';
	
	if (ini_get('allow_url_fopen') AND function_exists('get_headers'))
	{
		$headers = @get_headers($faviconurl);
	}
	else if (function_exists('curl_init') AND $ch = @curl_init($faviconurl))
	{
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
		
		$headers = explode("\n", curl_exec($ch));
		curl_close($ch);
	}
	
	if (isset($headers[0]) AND preg_match('/^HTTP\/1\.\d\s+200/', trim($headers[0])))
	{
		return true;
	}

	$pattern = '/<link[^>]+rel\s*=\s*["\']?\s*shortcut\s+icon\s*["\']?/i';
	
	if (ini_get('allow_url_fopen'))
	{
		return ($content = @file_get_contents($url) AND preg_match($pattern, $content));
	}
	else if (function_exists('curl_init') AND $ch = @curl_init($url))
	{
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
		
		return preg_match($pattern, curl_exec($ch));
	}
	
	return false;
}

PHP:

Not sure if get_headers() requires allow_url_fopen though...

 

thanks everyone + nico for the help