Follow Redirect Return Final URL

If you want to scrape a link and follow the redirect(s) to get the final url, you can use the following php function. This will work to get what is behind the redirect of a tracking link, to see where a bit.ly or other shortened url resolves to, etc.

function follow($url){ 
 
	$ch = curl_init();
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT,true);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"); 
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 120);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 120);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0); 
 
	$result = curl_exec($ch);
 
	$header  = curl_getinfo($ch); 
 
        curl_close($ch); 
 
	return $header['url'];  
 
}

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Follow Redirect Return Final URL,” an entry on PHP Functionalism

Published:
11.12.11 / 5pm
Category:
Functions, Screen Scraping
Tags: