How can I find where I will be redirected using cURL in PHP?

user_424156 0
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I'm trying to make curl follow a redirect but I can't quite get it to work right. I have a string that I want to send as a GET param to a server and get the resulting URL.

Example:

String = Kobold Vermin
Url = www.wowhead.com/search?q=Kobold+Worker

If you go to that url it will redirect you to "www.wowhead.com/npc=257". I want curl to return this URL to my PHP code so that i can extract the "npc=257" and use it.

Current code:

function npcID($name) {
    $urltopost = "http://www.wowhead.com/search?q=" . $name;
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $urltopost);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.wowhead.com");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded"));
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
    return curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
}

This however returns www.wowhead.com/search?q=Kobold+Worker and not www.wowhead.com/npc=257.

I suspect PHP is returning before the external redirect happens. How can I fix this?

redirect curl php
7 Answers

Lot's of regex here, despite the fact i really like them this way might be more stable to me:

$resultCurl=curl_exec($curl); //get curl result
//Optional line if you want to store the http status code
$headerHttpCode=curl_getinfo($curl,CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

//let's use dom and xpath
$dom = new \DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$dom->loadHTML($resultCurl, LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD);
libxml_use_internal_errors(false);
$xpath = new \DOMXPath($dom);
$head=$xpath->query("/html/body/p/a/@href");

$newUrl=$head[0]->nodeValue;

The location part is a link in the HTML sent by apache. So Xpath is perfect to recover it.

user_11541900
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