I recently came to a situation where I had to check 1800 links validity. No chance to do it manually. I decided to write some PHP code to check these URLs using the PHP get_headers function. Checking an URL seems easy but it takes a tiny amount of time to process because it calls distant resources: DNS lookup, connection time, download time… for each request. Using a simple « while » PHP function, you may come across three issues:
- it may be very long to complete and it’s not always possible to increase the PHP maximum execution time
- the display: your web page will be blank for quite a long time until enough data is processed. Of course you may play with the buffer handler but still!
- the process: as PHP is not a multi-threaded language out of the box, it will check one link by one. Much longer…
Therefore, I developed a very simple peace of code to solve these issues. As it is working quite softly, I decided to share it with you.
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