What is the best practice for checking the existence of external pages in a link database using PHP?

When working with a link database in PHP, it's important to check the existence of external pages to ensure the links are valid and not broken. One way to do this is by sending a HTTP request to the URL and checking the response code. If the response code is in the 2xx range, it indicates that the page exists. 

$url = 'https://example.com';

$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_exec($ch);

$response_code = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

if ($response_code >= 200 && $response_code < 300) {
    echo 'Page exists';
} else {
    echo 'Page does not exist';
}

curl_close($ch);

Keywords

PHP database link existence validation

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