perlquestion
kidd
Hello monks:
Im looking for some ideas in how is the best way to do this.
<p>
Im making a script that takes an URL as an input and checks for its existance. The current code I came up with is this:
<p>
<code>
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use CGI;
my $q = new CGI;
my $url = $q->params('url');
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $request = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
my $response = $ua->request($request);
my $string = $response->content;
$string =~ s/\n//gi;
if($string =~ /404 Not Found/ or $string eq ''){
print "$url - Doesn't exist\n";
next;
}else{
print "$url - Does exist\n";
next;
}
</code>
<p>
What I do is that I fetch the URL and then check for either the string "404 Not Found" in the <code>$tring</code> or for it to be empty.
<p>
The problem with this approach is that there may be a possibilitie that the page has some text that say "404 Not Found" as part of the content but it actually exists.
<p>
So I thought that maybe there will be some kind of headers that tell you what kind of response you got...maybe a <b>302</b> or a <b>501</b>, but I got no idea of how can I achieve this.
<p>
Thanks