Member Avatar for getsunil

hi all,
Please share the information about Link Validation.What is this and what is the process of doing this.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by devisrimari1

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asked about link validation; the core idea is simple: crawl a page (or site), extract each link, and check whether that link resolves correctly (200), redirects (3xx), or is broken (4xx/5xx). That matters for SEO and user experience because search engines and visitors react badly to lots of broken links.

Two practical routes: use an off‑the‑shelf checker (desktop/web tools and Google Search Console will flag many problems) or build a small script. The thread veered toward the PHP parser file many projects use (simple_html_dom). For clarity: that file is PHP source code — editable with any text/code editor — and to execute a link‑checker you need a PHP runtime (local stack or a PHP host) and the cURL extension enabled.

Typical server‑side workflow:

  • fetch a page
  • parse anchors and form/action attributes with the HTML parser
  • normalize relative URLs to absolute
  • ignore non‑HTTP links (mailto:, tel:, javascript:, fragments)
  • check each URL with a HEAD or lightweight GET (follow redirects if you want)
  • record HTTP status, final URL, and response time
  • throttle requests, respect robots.txt/crawl‑delay, and store results (CSV/DB)

Example minimal PHP sketch (requires simple_html_dom and cURL):

<?php
require_once 'simple_html_dom.php';

function get_status($url){
  $ch = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
  curl_exec($ch);
  $code = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $code;
}

$html = file_get_html('https://example.com');
foreach ($html->find('a') as $a){
  $href = $a->href;
  if (!$href || strpos($href,'mailto:')===0 || strpos($href,'#')===0) continue;
  // normalize $href to absolute before checking
  echo $href . ' -> ' . get_status($href) . PHP_EOL;
}

Troubleshooting: if you can’t run PHP locally, install a LAMP/MAMP/XAMPP stack or use your host. If cURL is missing enable the extension. If parsing fails check file encoding or server‑side HTML differences. Always add delays and limits so you don’t overload target servers.

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All 4 Replies

Member Avatar for devisrimari1

hi,
sry your sound not clear. asking link validation regarding to what.

Edited by devisrimari1 because: n/a
Member Avatar for claydcousta

I'm not familiar at all with what it takes to open the 'simple_html_dom_.php' file indicated. Do I have to download anything or perhaps notify my web host to make this available to me? Please excuse the ignorance. I'm kind of learning as I go.

Member Avatar for SHNOOKY

Are you just asking how to open that file?

Member Avatar for devisrimari1

hi,
seems to be you are looking for how to open that (simple_html_dom_.php)file,if so then use Dreamweaver to open it.

let me know if you need further help..

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