I am currently using:
$page = simplexml_load_file('http://www.example.com/page.html');
In my code I would like to retry if the page time outs, but if the page is not found (404) I would like to add it to a list of not found pages.
If I could differentiate between the two types of errors I can do the rest.
For the curious you can get the status code with the following code:
if ($page == FALSE)
{
list($version,$status_code,$msg) = explode(' ',$http_response_header[0], 3);
echo 'Status Code: '.$status_code."\n";
...
But for I wanted to do curl worked out better.