Entry

Any suggestions for a link checker for a site of php3 scripts?

Feb 29th, 2000 10:48
Matt Gregory, John Paige,

There are two different breeds of link checker.  The first is the 
client side link checker program (like the one in Netscape's editor) 
which checks all the links on your page to see if they are valid.  The 
client-side link checkers should work fine provided that they do not 
try to index the php script.  Some client side link checkers will allow 
you to specify that all links are followed by treating localhost like a 
server and performing a get call to localhost.  These will work fine 
for doing link checking since the php script will not be returned, only 
HTML.
The second breed of link-checkers are indexers like those used by 
Google, Yahoo, and all the other big search-engines.  Google for one 
does not follow links directly.  It performs a get on each page and 
then indexes the result from the server.  This works fine for indexing 
PHP, Pearl and any other scripted page which returns HTML for a 
result.  The only problem comes in when the page is retrieved in native 
form without having been interpreted by the parser.  This will cause 
the indexer to misunderstand the page.  Also, make sure that each of 
your scripts (or at least the page returned from the script) contains 
metadata describing the page contents.  This will make your site be 
listed more correctly under category by the indexing program.