From: Todd Benson <caduceass@...>
Date: 2008-09-11T07:32:40+09:00
Subject: Re: How to check if a webpage exists

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Davide Benini <nutsmuggler@hotmail.com> wrote:
> This probably is trivial, but I have been googling for almost 2hs
> without finding a viable solution.
> Basically I have this rails app which uses hpricot to parse web pages.
> There's this line
>
> page = Hpricot( open(url))
>
> If the url is wrong, or the server is down, obviously I get an
> exception.
> First I tried my luck with
>
> if page = Hpricot( open(url))
>  blah blah
> end
>
> but this did not work.
>
> Then I started googling like crazy for a method to check if a webpage is
> loadable. I only found this thread
>
> http://markmail.org/message/iurqf4ejbndbczqq
>
> I tried the suggested code, it does not work.
> Now, I am pretty sure there's a straightforward way of checking whether
> a webpage is loadable.
> Can you help me?
> Thanks in advance,
> Davide

Not really an answer, but should point you in the right direction.
Also, I can't test with Hpricot right now due to gem install issues.
But, using open-uri...

require 'open-uri'; begin; open('http://www.www.www') {} rescue '404 error'; end

Todd