UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming PHP and Server-side Scripting URL checker with perl4 compliant with NO external libraries

Looking for a block of code to check to see if a URL exists. Must be easily perl4 compliant, and require no special external libraries (i.e. libwww which has a perl4 version but requires patches to the server and as a result is not defacto supported). I have no problem importing an external library into my source as a sub routine or function, when I say external library I mean anything requiring special server setup.

All I need is a true/false response if a URL, i.e. http://xyz.com/test.html exists on the Internet or 404 error.

I've seen alot of shareware programs do this, spiders, and all kinds of special Perl5 only utilities. I need something universal which works in perl4 and can be one routine i.e. "$result = my checkurl($URL)" or whatever.

Help!

[ March 13, 2001: Message edited by: hate98 ]

Uhm, instead of trying to do something very difficult, I would suggest prodding the clueless sysadmin of whatever box you're on into upgrading to Perl5. Perl4 has traditionally contained all sorts of problems, including securty issues....

actually libwww is a piece of cake, and simple, simple routines to make it work once the server is updated locally. I saw demos on it which do what I want in 5 lines of code, and both perl4|5 versions exist. But what I plan on doing must be generic in nature across most platforms and not everyone runs perl5. It's for a UBB hack in production. I could be asking the impossible (or implausible, which is the better word to describe my dilemna.)

Uh, if this is for a UBB hack, then it only needs to run in Perl 5.004, minimum requirement....

If you do not know the answer to the question originally posed by the author of a given topic, kindly just say so or skip it. It appears you do not have a solution within the parameters I asked about so let's allow others to try. This topic is not about the issues you raised and trust me when I say I have my reasons. I am trying to see if code exists in the realm I asked about so I do not reinvent the wheel. Thank you for trying to help.

If code exists only in Perl5 and/or an external library (i.e. libwww) is required, then so be it and I've got my answer.

-Jim

Those that you mentioned would be the only solutons I know of. I would have asked the gurus in IRC or in clpm, but I would have been flamed to an utter crisp for even suggesting using perl4.

Trust me, it is not a good option and you should not consider doing it.

I understand fully and do tremendously appreciate your sentiments including what I quoted above. Thank you once again for offering your assistance. You may notice when I posted it to begin with that I was very specific about the criteria. That demonstrates I know *precisely* what weirdness that entails and I obviously knew all the modern solutions to code this.

Take care, Charles.

This thread can now be closed by moderator as I am searching for a needle in a haystack that caught fire and burned years ago! It's what I suspected, and Charles helped me confirm this.