6 March 2010

How to get HTTP headers of any remote file?

Another straight to the point solution

Want to check Content-Type or Content-Length of a remote file without downloading the whole file?
Then you should just request headers and not the whole file from a remote server using the HTTP protocol.

Here's how to do this using fsockopen:

function getHeaders($url)
{
	$path = parse_url($url);
	if (isset($path['query']))
	{
		$path['path'] .= '?' . $path['query'];
	}
	if (!isset($path['port']))
	{
		$path['port'] = 80;
	}
		
	$request	= "HEAD " . $path['path']. " HTTP/1.1\r\n";
	$request	.= "Host: " . $path['host'] . "\r\n";
	$request	.= "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
	$request	.= "Cache-Control: no-cache\r\n";
	$request	.= "User-Agent: MSIE\r\n";
	$request	.= "Connection: close\r\n";
	$request	.= "\r\n";
	
	$f = fsockopen($path['host'], $path['port'], $errno, $errstr);
	if ($f)
	{
	    fputs($f, $request);
	    while (!feof($f))
		{
			$headers[] = fgets($f);
		}
	    fclose($f);
	}
	return $headers; 	
}

You might also consider using cURL for this job:

function getHeadersCURL($url)
{
	$user_agent = 'MSIE';
	$ch = curl_init($url); 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'HEAD');
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 3);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 3); 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
	$result = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	
	$headers = array();
	
	$result = explode("\r", $result);
	if (count($result)>0)
	foreach ($result AS $line)
	{
		$headers[] = $line; 
	}
	return $headers;  
}

How to use it?

$headers = getHeaders('http://google.com');
print_r($headers);

How to get HTTP headers of any remote file?

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