How to get the status code of file_get_contents in PHP

The file_get_contents() function in PHP is pretty useful to easily request a resource from another server or locally.

Keep in mind that this only works for HTTP and HTTPS request and not when opening a file on your own system!

Get the status

The reserved PHP variable $http_response_header always contains the status code of the request.

<?php

  $request = file_get_contents("https://darkintaqt.com");
  $http_response_header; // For $request, because it was the last one

?>

$http_response_header is an array with all headers and also the status code. The status code is always the first index in the variable.

<?php

  $request = file_get_contents("https://darkintaqt.com");

  echo $http_response_header[0]; // Output: "HTTP/2 200 OK"

?>

Get the status code

Now we have an string as an output. We surely can better and extract only the status code as a number using this code snippet:

<?php

  $request = file_get_contents("https://darkintaqt.com");

  preg_match('/([0-9])\d+/',$http_response_header[0],$matches);

  $responsecode = intval($matches[0]);

  echo $responsecode; // Output: 200

?>

Tip

To avoid errors and warnings in the case of bad status codes, you can place an @ in front of the file_get_contents so that this does not throw any errors.

<?php

  $request = @file_get_contents("https://darkintaqt.com");

  preg_match('/([0-9])\d+/',$http_response_header[0],$matches);

  $responsecode = intval($matches[0]);

  echo $responsecode; // Output: 200

?>