PHP Curl get HTTP code, not whole document

Question

I'm using curl in PHP to check the HTTP code when requesting some files, I'm trying to make my speed run faster so I'm wondering is there a way to make it get the HTTP code without actually getting the web page from the remote host

Answer 1

Set CURLOPT_NOBODY to true. This means that rather than preforming a GET or POST request, a HEAD request will be preformed so the remote server will only return the HTTP header.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);

There is also some example code in this answer