Getting at headers when requesting a URL

[mralston]

I want to fetch a URL in PHP with fopen or popen or something.
Getting the main content of the page is fine, but I want to access the headers that the server sends back with the page. I'm sure it can be done with popen (or some command to open a tcp/ip connection to port 80?)

[phpman]

what headers do you plan on getting?

when you fetch a url with fopen you get the page as you would see it on the website. I don't believe you get any headers as you didn't output it to anything. also popen I also believe will not open url's

[mralston]

It's ok, I've figured out how to do it. Forgot to close this thread.
I was after the "Location" header.

I had it in my head that popen was short for "port open". The function I was actually after was fsockopen to open a raw socket to the server and manually send and receive the necessary headers.