Get a URL from a String - php

Question

For a little while now I've been searching for a code to get URL's out of a string using PHP. I'm basically trying to get a Shortened URL out of a message, and then later do a HEAD request to find the actual link.
Anyone have any code that returns URLs from strings?
Thanks in advance.
Edit for Ghost Dog:
Here is a sample of what I am parsing:
$test = "I am testing this application for http://test.com YAY!";
And here is the response I got that solved it:
$regex = '$\b(https?|ftp|file)://[-A-Z0-9+&##/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&##/%=~_|]$i';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
$A = $result[0];
foreach($A as $B)
{
$URL = GetRealURL($B);
echo "$URL<BR>";
}
function GetRealURL( $url )
{
$options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_HEADER => true,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "",
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "spider",
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true,
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120,
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
);
$ch = curl_init( $url );
curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
$content = curl_exec( $ch );
$err = curl_errno( $ch );
$errmsg = curl_error( $ch );
$header = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );
return $header['url'];
}
See Answer for the Details.

Answer 1

This code may be helpful (see MadTechie's latest post):
http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,245248.msg1146218.html#msg1146218
<?php
$string = "some random text http://tinyurl.com/9uxdwc some http://google.com random text http://tinyurl.com/787988";
$regex = '$\b(https?|ftp|file)://[-A-Z0-9+&##/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&##/%=~_|]$i';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
$A = $result[0];
foreach($A as $B)
{
$URL = GetRealURL($B);
echo "$URL<BR>";
}
function GetRealURL( $url )
{
$options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_HEADER => true,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "",
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "spider",
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true,
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120,
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
);
$ch = curl_init( $url );
curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
$content = curl_exec( $ch );
$err = curl_errno( $ch );
$errmsg = curl_error( $ch );
$header = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );
return $header['url'];
}
?>

Answer 2

Something like:
$matches = array();
preg_match_all('/http:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\/[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+/', $text, $matches);
print_r($matches);
You'll need to tune the regexp to get exactly what you want.
To get the URL out, consider something as simple as:
curl -I http://url.com/path | grep Location: | awk '{print $2}'