CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpcurlhttp-redirectheader
Zoey Malkov
Zoey Malkov

Reputation: 832

Get the destination URL only without loading the contents with cURL

If I visit the website https://example.com/a/abc?name=jack, I get redirected to https://example.com/b/uuid-123. I want only the end URL which is https://example.com/b/uuid-123. The contents of https://example.com/b/uuid-123 is about 1mb but I am not interested in the content. I only want the redirected URL and not the content. How can I get the redirected URL without having to also load the 1mb of content which wastes my bandwidth and time.

I have seen a few questions about redirection on stackoverflow but nothing on how not to load the content.

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com/a/abc?name=jack');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_exec($ch);
$end_url = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
curl_close($ch);

echo('End URL is ' . $end_url);

Upvotes: 1

Views: 418

Answers (1)

Smurker
Smurker

Reputation: 714

For clarity i'll add it as an answer as well.

You can tell curl to only retrieve the headers by setting the CURLOPT_NOBODY to true.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);

From these headers you can parse the location part to get the redirected URL.

Edit for potential future readers: CURLOPT_HEADER will also need to be set to true, i had left this out as you already had it included in your code.

Upvotes: 1

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