Adding External links may not guarantee to available all time, following code will check header response before redirect the user to that particular url using the following Code.
<?php $url = "http://www.w3lessons.com"; $user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0' $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,$user_agent); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, ""); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); $response = curl_exec($ch); // Then, after your curl_exec call: $header_size = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE); $header = substr($response, 0, $header_size); $body = substr($response, $header_size); curl_close($ch); echo "<pre>"; print_r($header); // Re HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) Last-Modified: Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:28:22 GMT ETag: "bc241f05-1aace1-4c3ee90929180" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 1748193 Content-Type: application/pdf Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:36:42 GMT Connection: keep-alive ?>
Checking corresponding Content-Type before redirecting user help to improve user experience.