Find where URL redirects to using PHP

Question

I am looking to find where a URL redirects to, currently I am getting a web page's information using file_get_contents() but some of the pages are returning a 301/302 header status and I want to use a function to find the url that the page redirects to;

function page_info($url) {
$fp = file_get_contents($url);
$title = preg_match("/<title>(.*)<\/title>/siU", $fp, $title_matches);
$h1 = preg_match("/<h1>(.*)<\/h1>/siU", $fp, $h1_matches);
$h2 = preg_match("/<h2>(.*)<\/h2>/siU", $fp, $h2_matches);
$meta_desc = get_meta_tags($url);
$data = array("title"=>trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $title_matches[1])), "metadesc" => $meta_desc['description'],"h1"=>trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $h1_matches[1])), "h2"=>trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $h2_matches[1])));
return $data;
}

Is there any way to just find out the url of the redirect so I can then run the page_info() function on the correct URL?

Answer 1

You need to use the php curl library. You can set it to follow redirects and then use the getinfo method to find our where it takes you.

$curl = curl_init('http://example.org/someredirect');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "foo");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);

curl_exec($curl);

if(!curl_errno($curl))
{
     $info = curl_getinfo($curl);
}

You can pass second parameters to the curl_getinfo method to get more specific information