Redirect if connection has timed out

Question

in my test homepage i am connecting to server and taking some data, but if somehow server cannot respond i want to redirect user to some other page, so i have a question how can i do that?

$url = 'server address';
$contents = file_get_contents($url);
//if connection times out make redirect 

as far as i understand i can make redirection like this:

header("Location: http://www.yourwebsite.com/page");
exit();

but how to make redirect only if connection times out?

Answer 1

This will test if the file was loaded. If it was not loaded it will return boolean false, but can also return a non-boolean value which evaluates to false. But you should take care when using an if statement to check this. More info here.

http://php.net/function.file-get-contents

if(!$contents){
  header("location:http://www.yourwebsite.com/page");
  exit();
}