How can I find where I will be redirected using cURL in PHP?

Php Problem Overview

I'm trying to make curl follow a redirect but I can't quite get it to work right. I have a string that I want to send as a GET param to a server and get the resulting URL.

Example:

> String = Kobold Vermin
> Url = www.wowhead.com/search?q=Kobold+Worker

If you go to that url it will redirect you to "www.wowhead.com/npc=257". I want curl to return this URL to my PHP code so that i can extract the "npc=257" and use it.

Current code:

function npcID($name) {
    $urltopost = "http://www.wowhead.com/search?q=" . $name;
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $urltopost);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.wowhead.com");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded"));
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
    return curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
}

This however returns www.wowhead.com/search?q=Kobold+Worker and not www.wowhead.com/npc=257.

I suspect PHP is returning before the external redirect happens. How can I fix this?

Php Solutions

Solution 1 - Php

To make cURL follow a redirect, use:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

Erm... I don't think you're actually executing the curl... Try:

curl_exec($ch);

...after setting the options, and before the curl_getinfo() call.

EDIT: If you just want to find out where a page redirects to, I'd use the advice here, and just use Curl to grab the headers and extract the Location: header from them:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
if (preg_match('~Location: (.*)~i', $result, $match)) {
   $location = trim($match[1]);
}

Solution 2 - Php

Add this line to curl inizialization

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

and use getinfo before curl_close

$redirectURL = curl_getinfo($ch,CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL );

es:

$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT ,0); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
$redirectURL = curl_getinfo($ch,CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL );
curl_close($ch);

Solution 3 - Php

The answer above didn't work for me on one of my servers, something to to with basedir, so I re-hashed it a little. The code below works on all my servers.

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$a = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close( $ch ); 
// the returned headers
$headers = explode("\n",$a);
// if there is no redirection this will be the final url
$redir = $url;
// loop through the headers and check for a Location: str
$j = count($headers);
for($i = 0; $i < $j; $i++){
// if we find the Location header strip it and fill the redir var		
if(strpos($headers[$i],"Location:") !== false){
		$redir = trim(str_replace("Location:","",$headers[$i]));
		break;
	}
}
// do whatever you want with the result
echo $redir;

Solution 4 - Php

The chosen answer here is decent but its case sensitive, doesn't protect against relative location: headers (which some sites do) or pages that might actually have the phrase Location: in their content... (which zillow currently does).

A bit sloppy, but a couple quick edits to make this a bit smarter are:

function getOriginalURL($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    $httpStatus = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    curl_close($ch);
    
    // if it's not a redirection (3XX), move along
    if ($httpStatus < 300 || $httpStatus >= 400)
        return $url;

    // look for a location: header to find the target URL
    if(preg_match('/location: (.*)/i', $result, $r)) {
        $location = trim($r[1]);

        // if the location is a relative URL, attempt to make it absolute
        if (preg_match('/^\/(.*)/', $location)) {
            $urlParts = parse_url($url);
            if ($urlParts['scheme'])
                $baseURL = $urlParts['scheme'].'://';

            if ($urlParts['host'])
                $baseURL .= $urlParts['host'];

            if ($urlParts['port'])
                $baseURL .= ':'.$urlParts['port'];

            return $baseURL.$location;
        }

        return $location;
    }
    return $url;
}

Note that this still only goes 1 redirection deep. To go deeper, you actually need to get the content and follow the redirects.

Solution 5 - Php

Sometimes you need to get HTTP headers but at the same time you don't want return those headers.**

This skeleton takes care of cookies and HTTP redirects using recursion. The main idea here is to avoid return HTTP headers to the client code.

You can build a very strong curl class over it. Add POST functionality, etc.

<?php

class curl {

  static private $cookie_file            = '';
  static private $user_agent             = '';  
  static private $max_redirects          = 10;  
  static private $followlocation_allowed = true;

  function __construct()
  {
    // set a file to store cookies
    self::$cookie_file = 'cookies.txt';

    // set some general User Agent
    self::$user_agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)';

    if ( ! file_exists(self::$cookie_file) || ! is_writable(self::$cookie_file))
    {
      throw new Exception('Cookie file missing or not writable.');
    }

    // check for PHP settings that unfits
    // correct functioning of CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION 
    if (ini_get('open_basedir') != '' || ini_get('safe_mode') == 'On')
    {
      self::$followlocation_allowed = false;
    }    
  }

  /**
   * Main method for GET requests
   * @param  string $url URI to get
   * @return string      request's body
   */
  static public function get($url)
  {
    $process = curl_init($url);    

    self::_set_basic_options($process);

    // this function is in charge of output request's body
    // so DO NOT include HTTP headers
    curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

    if (self::$followlocation_allowed)
    {
      // if PHP settings allow it use AUTOMATIC REDIRECTION
      curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
      curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, self::$max_redirects); 
    }
    else
    {
      curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
    }

    $return = curl_exec($process);

    if ($return === false)
    {
      throw new Exception('Curl error: ' . curl_error($process));
    }

    // test for redirection HTTP codes
    $code = curl_getinfo($process, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    if ($code == 301 || $code == 302)
    {
      curl_close($process);

      try
      {
        // go to extract new Location URI
        $location = self::_parse_redirection_header($url);
      }
      catch (Exception $e)
      {
        throw $e;
      }

      // IMPORTANT return 
      return self::get($location);
    }

    curl_close($process);

    return $return;
  }

  static function _set_basic_options($process)
  {
    
    curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, self::$user_agent);
    curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, self::$cookie_file);
    curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, self::$cookie_file);
    curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    // curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
    // curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
    // curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
  }

  static function _parse_redirection_header($url)
  {
    $process = curl_init($url);    

    self::_set_basic_options($process);

    // NOW we need to parse HTTP headers
    curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);

    $return = curl_exec($process);

    if ($return === false)
    {
      throw new Exception('Curl error: ' . curl_error($process));
    }

    curl_close($process);

    if ( ! preg_match('#Location: (.*)#', $return, $location))
    {
      throw new Exception('No Location found');
    }

    if (self::$max_redirects-- <= 0)
    {
      throw new Exception('Max redirections reached trying to get: ' . $url);
    }

    return trim($location[1]);
  }

}

Solution 6 - Php

You can use:

$redirectURL = curl_getinfo($ch,CURLINFO_REDIRECT_URL);

Solution 7 - Php

Lot's of regex here, despite the fact i really like them this way might be more stable to me:

$resultCurl=curl_exec($curl); //get curl result
//Optional line if you want to store the http status code
$headerHttpCode=curl_getinfo($curl,CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

//let's use dom and xpath
$dom = new \DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$dom->loadHTML($resultCurl, LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD);
libxml_use_internal_errors(false);
$xpath = new \DOMXPath($dom);
$head=$xpath->query("/html/body/p/a/@href");

$newUrl=$head[0]->nodeValue;

The location part is a link in the HTML sent by apache. So Xpath is perfect to recover it.

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Thomas Van Nuffel	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Php	Matt Gibson	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Php	Luca Camillo	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Php	GR1NN3R	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Php	broox	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Php	Igor Parra	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Php	Abhilash Nayak	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 7 - Php	Patrick Valibus	View Answer on Stackoverflow