File_Get_Contents When Url Doesn't Exist

file_get_contents when url doesn't exist

You need to check the HTTP response code:

function get_http_response_code($url) {
    $headers = get_headers($url);
    return substr($headers[0], 9, 3);
}
if(get_http_response_code('http://somenotrealurl.com/notrealpage') != "200"){
    echo "error";
}else{
    file_get_contents('http://somenotrealurl.com/notrealpage');
}

file_get_contents returns 404 when URL is opened with the Browser and URL is valid

Sometimes a website will block crawlers(from remote servers) from getting to their pages.

What they do to work around this is spoof a browsers headers. Like pretend to be Mozilla Firefox instead of the sneaky PHP web scraper they are.

This is a function which uses the cURL library to do just that.

function get_data($url) {

$userAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
if (!$html) {
    echo "<br />cURL error number:" .curl_errno($ch);
    echo "<br />cURL error:" . curl_error($ch);
    exit;
}
else{
    return $html;
}

//End of cURL function

}

One would then call it as below:

$response = get_data($requesturl);

Curl offers much more options in fetching of remote content and error checking than file_get_contents does. If you even want to customize it further, check out the list of cURL options here - Abridged list of cURL options

File_get_contents not evaluating to false when file does not exist

file_get_contents() generates an E_WARNING level error (failed to open stream) which is what you'll want to suppress as you're already handling it with your exception class.

You can suppress this warning by adding PHP's error control operator @ in front of file_get_contents(), example:

<?php

$path = 'test.php';
if (@file_get_contents($path) === false) {
    echo 'false';
    die();
}

echo 'true';

?>

The above echoes false, without the @ operator it returns both the E_WARNING and the echoed false. It may be the case that the warning error is interfering with your throw function, but without seeing the code for that it's hard to say.

file_get_contents false when url have spaces (encode everything not working)

use this function

function escapefile_url($url){
  $parts = parse_url($url);
  $path_parts = array_map('rawurldecode', explode('/', $parts['path']));

  return
    $parts['scheme'] . '://' .
    $parts['host'] .
    implode('/', array_map('rawurlencode', $path_parts))
  ;
}

echo escapefile_url("http://example.com/foo/bar bof/some file.jpg") . "\n";
echo escapefile_url("http://example.com/foo/bar+bof/some+file.jpg") . "\n";
echo escapefile_url("http://example.com/foo/bar%20bof/some%20file.jpg") . "\n";

How can I handle the warning of file_get_contents() function in PHP?

Step 1: check the return code: if($content === FALSE) { // handle error here... }

Step 2: suppress the warning by putting an error control operator (i.e. @) in front of the call to file_get_contents():
$content = @file_get_contents($site);

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