How To Check If a Remote Page Has a 301 Redirect via CURL?

Hello.

I want to check if a specific remote page (an image in my case, e.g. http://i38.tinypic.com/2nv8l1k.jpg - (safe for work)) redirects to another page via CURL.

Sometimes TinyURL deletes the image unexpectedly and redirects all requests to http://tinypic.com/images/404.gif

I want to check if a remote image I try to request like this:

<? get_file("http://i38.tinypic.com/2nv8l1k.jpg") ?>

PHP:

...redirects to the 404 image or not. If it does I will show a default image of my own.

If I could do this without having to download the image (in case it exists at TinyURL) so I don't put load on the server with a lot of CURL downloads - it would be great.

Currently I have this CURL downloading function:

function get_data($url)
{
	$ch = curl_init();
	$timeout = 5;
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	return $data;
}

PHP:

Is it possible?

 

Please give it a try with

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);

I hope this will help you to redirect to a referred page if one is there.

 

<?php
$headers = get_headers("http://i38.tinypic.com/2nv8l1k.jpg", 1);
if ($headers[0] == "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"){
  echo "Image found";
} else {
  echo "Image not found";
}
?>

PHP:

 

This will just make CURL follow the image URL to the 404 image URL, which I want to avoid.

I've tried this and it works. However, is the get_headers() function resource friendly? I mean, it won't put much stress to the server, right? I am guessing it's not actually downloading the remote file to the server, but only it's headers.

 

Better than CURL, it will only get the headers.