get ONLY the http status code with curl and php

Question

I'm trying to get only the three digit http status code number and nothing more in the variable $response. For example 302, 404, 301, and what not. Another observation I noticed with my code is on some websites such as google it's downloading what appears to be part of the body, which is a huge waste of bandwidth and slow.

<?php

$URL  = 'http://www.google.com';
$curlHandle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
$response = curl_exec($curlHandle);
echo $response;  
?>

Answer 1

You can set the CURLOPT_NOBODY option to not receive a body. Then you can get the status code with curl_getinfo .

Like so:

<?php

$URL  = 'http://www.google.com';
$curlHandle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_NOBODY  , true);  // we don't need body
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_exec($curlHandle);
$response = curl_getinfo($curlHandle, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($curlHandle); // Don't forget to close the connection

echo $response,""; 
?>

Answer 2

First off, you get only the headers (CURLOPT_NOBODY).

Then you capture the HTML as the result (CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER).

Finally you extract the HTTP code with a regex that gets the first numbers surrounded by spaces.

$URL  = 'http://www.google.com';
$curlHandle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($curlHandle);
preg_match('/ \d+ /', $response, $matches);
$response = $matches[0];

Answer 3

For just the status code you can use this:

function getStatusCode($url) {
   $headers = get_headers($url);
   preg_match('/\s(\d+)\s/', $headers[0], $matches);
   return $matches[0];
 }

 echo getStatusCode('http://www.google.com');

http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-headers.php

Answer 4

curl_exec($curlHandle);
$curl_info = curl_getinfo($curlHandle);
$response =  $curl_info['http_code'];