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

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?

Solution 1:

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:

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:

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:

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.