Getting executed URL from CURL - php

Question

I have a Affiliate URL Like http://track.abc.com/?affid=1234
open this link will go to http://www.abc.com
now i want to execute the http://track.abc.com/?affid=1234 Using CURL
and now how i can Get http://www.abc.com
with Curl ?

Answer 1

If you want cURL to follow redirect headers from the responses it receives, you need to set that option with:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
You may also want to limit the number of redirects it follows using:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 3);
So you'd using something similar to this:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://track.abc.com/?affid=1234");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 3);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
Edit: Question wasn't exactly clear but from the comment below, if you want to get the redirect location, you need to get the headers from cURL and parse them for the Location header:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://track.abc.com/?affid=1234");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
This will give you the headers returned by the server in $data, simply parse through them to get the location header and you'll get your result. This question shows you how to do that.

Answer 2

I wrote a function that will extract any header from a cURL header response.
function getHeader($headerString, $key) {
preg_match('#\s\b' . $key . '\b:\s.*\s#', $headerString, $header);
return substr($header[0], strlen($key) + 3, -2);
}
In this case, you're looking for the value of the header Location. I tested the function by retrieving headers from a TinyURL, that redirects to http://google.se, using cURL.
$url = "http://tinyurl.com/dtrkv";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$location = getHeader($data, 'Location');
var_dump($location);
Output from the var_dump.
string(16) "http://google.se"