how to check if the link exist in the remote website

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
September 26, 2008
8 replies
2987 views

Hi all:

Can you guys please tell me if there is a way I can check if the link exist in the remote website? for example

<cfif hyper link to www.mysite.com exisit in www.remotesite.com>
good .. let's continue
<cfelse>
Please add link to www.mysite.com before you can continue
</cfif>

Is this possible ... do you have to use spider? If so how do I do it?

Thanks Guys,
A

Getting started

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Newsgroup_User

to expand on tclaremont's excellent suggestion:

you can use refindnocase() to search the filecontent returned by cfhttp
call:

<cfset myurl = " http://www.yourwebsite.com">
<cfhttp url=" http://www.VisitorsPage" method="GET" result="Foobar"
resolveurl="yes" getasbinary="auto"></cfhttp>
<cfif
foobar.Statuscode is "200 OK">
<cfif refindnocase('<a [^>]*href[^>]*' & replace(myurl, '.', '\.',
'all') & '[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>', Foobar.filecontent)>
link exists
<cfelse>
no link...
</cfif>
<cfelse>
connection error... or requested web page does not exist...
</cfif>

of course, if the www.VisitorsPage site is sneaky and has the link to
your site in page's code, but hides it with css/javascript, it's gonna
be tricky to uncover using regexp... better just go and look at their
website...

Azadi Saryev
Sabai-dee.com
http://www.sabai-dee.com/

A

Anonymous

Thank you to both of you tclaremont and Azadi. You guys Rocks!!!

A

N

Newsgroup_UserCorrect answer

Inspiring

to expand on tclaremont's excellent suggestion:

you can use refindnocase() to search the filecontent returned by cfhttp
call:

<cfset myurl = " http://www.yourwebsite.com">
<cfhttp url=" http://www.VisitorsPage" method="GET" result="Foobar"
resolveurl="yes" getasbinary="auto"></cfhttp>
<cfif
foobar.Statuscode is "200 OK">
<cfif refindnocase('<a [^>]*href[^>]*' & replace(myurl, '.', '\.',
'all') & '[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>', Foobar.filecontent)>
link exists
<cfelse>
no link...
</cfif>
<cfelse>
connection error... or requested web page does not exist...
</cfif>

of course, if the www.VisitorsPage site is sneaky and has the link to
your site in page's code, but hides it with css/javascript, it's gonna
be tricky to uncover using regexp... better just go and look at their
website...

Azadi Saryev
Sabai-dee.com
http://www.sabai-dee.com/

tclaremont

Inspiring

OK, after thinking about your post some more, it sounds like you are trying to determine if another site contains a link back to your site, probably so you can establish reciprocal links or something like that.

You can start by asking the visitor to enter the URL of the page where your link is supposed to appear. Lets say they enter " http://www.VisitorsPage.htm".

You would then need to do a CFHTTP of that page, like this:

<cfhttp url=" http://www.VisitorsPage" method="GET" result="Foobar" resolveurl="yes" getasbinary="auto"></CFHTTP>

This will return a number of variables, one of them being FileContent, which is, predictably, the content.

#Foobar.FileContent#

Then, use ColdFusions string functions to SEARCH the retrieved page (#Foobar.FileContent#) for instances of your URL. If the function returns at least one match, you know that the link in question exists on that page.

tclaremont

Inspiring

Sorry, but I seem to have confused your question with another on the forums, and suggested an answer that is not exactly what you were looking for.

If I understand corectly, you are looking to see if a URL exists on ANOTHER website? What is your objective here?

A

Anonymous

hi guys sitesearch is not free so that's not going to work for me as this is a non profit community site. tclaremont can you post some code example of your approach with cfhttp?

Thank you all of you..

A

tclaremont

Inspiring

You can peform a CFHTTP call to the link they inputted, and then evaluate the results of that call. If the response is greater than a certain size, there is a pretty good chance that the URL is valid. If it is tiny, it is probably returning a file not found type of message.

You could also show the content of the link in a frame or new window, and ask the end user to verify with a Y/N box that this is, in fact, the page they want to use.