InternetCheckConnectionA function (wininet.h)

Article
02/09/2023

[InternetCheckConnection is available for use in the operating systems specified in the Requirements section. It may be altered or unavailable in subsequent versions. Instead, use NetworkInformation.GetInternetConnectionProfile or the NLM Interfaces. ]

Allows an application to check if a connection to the Internet can be established.

Syntax

BOOL InternetCheckConnectionA(
  [in] LPCSTR lpszUrl,
  [in] DWORD  dwFlags,
  [in] DWORD  dwReserved
);

Parameters

[in] lpszUrl

Pointer to a null-terminated string that specifies the URL to use to check the connection. This value can be NULL.

[in] dwFlags

Options. FLAG_ICC_FORCE_CONNECTION is the only flag that is currently available. If this flag is set, it forces a connection. A sockets connection is attempted in the following order:

If lpszUrl is non-NULL, the host value is extracted from it and used to ping that specific host.
If lpszUrl is NULL and there is an entry in the internal server database for the nearest server, the host value is extracted from the entry and used to ping that server.

[in] dwReserved

This parameter is reserved and must be 0.

Return value

Returns TRUE if a connection is made successfully, or FALSE otherwise. Use GetLastError to retrieve the error code. ERROR_NOT_CONNECTED is returned by GetLastError if a connection cannot be made or if the sockets database is unconditionally offline.

Remarks

InternetCheckConnection is deprecated. InternetCheckConnection does not work in environments that use a web proxy server to access the Internet. Depending on the environment, use NetworkInformation.GetInternetConnectionProfile or the NLM Interfaces to check for Internet access instead.

Note WinINet does not support server implementations. In addition, it should not be used from a service. For server implementations or services use Microsoft Windows HTTP Services (WinHTTP).

Note

The wininet.h header defines InternetCheckConnection as an alias which automatically selects the ANSI or Unicode version of this function based on the definition of the UNICODE preprocessor constant. Mixing usage of the encoding-neutral alias with code that not encoding-neutral can lead to mismatches that result in compilation or runtime errors. For more information, see Conventions for Function Prototypes.

Requirements

Requirement	Value
Minimum supported client	Windows 2000 Professional [desktop apps only]
Minimum supported server	Windows 2000 Server [desktop apps only]
Target Platform	Windows
Header	wininet.h
Library	Wininet.lib
DLL	Wininet.dll