PHP Curl following redirects

Question

I\'m trying to be a bit sneeky and as part of a learning process try and improve my page scraping skills.

One thing i\'ve come across that I have yet to be able to s

Answer 1

If you can't use CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, I suggest you use a recursive method like this one:

function getUrl($url, $count) {

    // max number of redirects
    if ($count > 5) {
        return false;
    }

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    $httpCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

    curl_close($ch);

    if (!$data) {
        return false;
    }

    $dataArray = explode("\r\n\r\n", $data, 2);

    if (count($dataArray) != 2) {
        return false;
    }

    list($header, $body) = $dataArray;
    if ($httpCode == 301 || $httpCode == 302) {
        $matches = array();
        preg_match('/Location:(.*?)\n/', $header, $matches);

        if (isset($matches[1])) {
            return getUrl(trim($matches[1]), $count + 1);
        }
    } else {
        return $body;
    }
}