How to check if a website is up?

[anev]

I'm a perl newbie and have a question for you perlmonks... I have a particular URL, and I need to find out if the content for that URL is available on the hosting server. I would use the Ping module, but I read in the Perl Cookbook that "It's better to think of a ping as testing whether a machine is reachable, rather than whether the machine is doing its job." So it will only tell me if the server is there, but won't let me know if I can access the content for that URL (i.e. is the site up and running? or is it down?). Is there something like Ping that I could use to find out this information? Thanks in advance! Anev