URL exists?

[Brian Yennie]

I think the only way that will be technically faster than this would be 
to use sockets, and make a HEAD request, rather than a GET for the url 
in question.

You'd have to look up http protocol, but basically what it does it let 
you get just the http headers for a page rather than the contents. 
You'd also have to parse the return code...

But it would be faster than fetching the whole page when it exists. If 
you want to try that, I can probably dig out a URL to read up on it.

Depending on the circumstance, it might also help to do some sort of 
lookup on the domain name first and see if that fails- 
hostnameToAddress() for example.

HTH

- Brian

> What's the fastest way to check if an URL exists?
>
> I tried:
>
> if URL "http://www.whatever.com/something/else.html" is empty then
>   blah blah blah
> end if
>
> Very very slow.  Is there a faster way?