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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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;