Help with file_exists in PHP

programming
1

I wrote a simple XML parser that takes a feedburner feed and loops out a few titles and permalinks.

As a failsafe to keep the whole page from breaking if the feed is down or something I wanted to add an if statement using file_exists. But it keeps returning false even though the url is correct.

I have limited PHP knowledge. Am I doing this right? Is there a better way to do this?

<?php

$request_url = "http://feeds.feedburner.com/feed";
if(file_exists($request_url)) {
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($request_url) or die("feed not loading");


    for($i=0;$i&lt;5;$i++) {
        $title = $xml-&gt;channel-&gt;item[$i]-&gt;title;
        $link = $xml-&gt;channel-&gt;item[$i]-&gt;link;
        
        echo"&lt;a href=".'"'.$link.'"'."&gt;";
        
        echo($title);
        echo"&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;";
    };
} else {
    echo "Cannot locate blog feed.";
}

?>

<?php 
 
    $request_url = "http://feeds.feedburner.com/feed";
    if(file_exists($request_url)) {
        $xml = simplexml_load_file($request_url) or die("feed not loading");
    
    
        for($i=0;$i<5;$i++) {
            $title = $xml->channel->item[$i]->title;
            $link = $xml->channel->item[$i]->link;
            
            echo"<a href=".'"'.$link.'"'.">";
            
            echo($title);
            echo"</a><br />";
        };
    } else {
        echo "Cannot locate blog feed.";
    }
?>

btw, this editor is giving me grief. . . I apologize for the repeated code. It won’t let me remove it.