Curl, follow location but only get header of the new location?

Question

I know that when I set CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION to true, cURL will follow the Location header and redirect to new page. But is it possible only to get header of the new page w

Answer 1

No. You'd have to disable FOLLOWLOCATION, extract the redirect URL from the response, and then issue a new HEAD request with that URL.

Answer 2

Appears to be a duplicate of PHP cURL: Get target of redirect, without following it

However, this can be done in 3 easy steps:

Step 1. Initialise curl

curl_init($ch); //initialise the curl handle
//COOKIESESSION is optional, use if you want to keep cookies in memory
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true);

Step 2. Get the headers for $url

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); //specify your URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true); //include headers in http data
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false); //don't follow redirects
$http_data = curl_exec($ch); //hit the $url
$curl_info = curl_getinfo($ch);
$headers = substr($http_data, 0, $curl_info["header_size"]); //split out header

Step 3. Parse the headers to get the new URL

preg_match("!\r\n(?:Location|URI): *(.*?) *\r\n!", $headers, $matches);
$url = $matches[1];

Once you have the new URL you can then repeat steps 2-3 as often as you like.

Answer 3

And for analyze headers, your can use CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION

Answer 4

Set CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION as false and CURLOPT_HEADER as true, and get the "Location" from the response header.

Answer 5

Make sure you set CURLOPT_HEADER to True to get the headers in the response, otherwise the response returned as blank string

Answer 6

You can get the redirect URL directly with curl_getinfo:

  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, false);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); //specify your URL
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true); //include headers in http data
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false); //don't follow redirects
  $http_data = curl_exec($ch); //hit the $url
  $redirect = curl_getinfo($ch)['redirect_url'];
  curl_close($ch);

  return $redirect;