PHP cURL HTTP CODE return 0

Question

I dont understand when I echo $httpCode I always get 0, I was expecting 404 when I change $html_brand into a broken url. Is there anything that I miss or do not know of? Thanks.

 //check if url exist
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $html_brand);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$response = curl_exec($ch); 
$httpCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

if ($httpCode == 404) {
    echo "The Web Page Cannot Be Found";
    return;
}
curl_close($ch);

Answer 1

If you connect with the server, then you can get a return code from it, otherwise it will fail and you get a 0. So if you try to connect to "www.google.com/lksdfk" you will get a return code of 400, if you go directly to google.com, you will get 302 (and then 200 if you forward to the next page... well I do because it forwards to google.com.br, so you might not get that), and if you go to "googlecom" you will get a 0 (host no found), so with the last one, there is nobody to send a code back.

Tested using the code below.

<?php

$html_brand = "www.google.com";
$ch = curl_init();

$options = array(
    CURLOPT_URL            => $html_brand,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_HEADER         => true,
    CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
    CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",
    CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,
    CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,
    CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,
);
curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
$response = curl_exec($ch); 
$httpCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

if ( $httpCode != 200 ){
    echo "Return code is {$httpCode} 
"
        .curl_error($ch);
} else {
    echo "<pre>".htmlspecialchars($response)."</pre>";
}

curl_close($ch);