[Updated At Bottom]
Hi everyone.
Start With Short URLs:
Imagine that you've got a collection of 5 short urls (like http://bit.ly) in a php array, like this:
$shortUrlArray = array("http://bit.ly/123",
"http://bit.ly/123",
"http://bit.ly/123",
"http://bit.ly/123",
"http://bit.ly/123");
End with Final, Redirected URLs:
How can I get the final url of these short urls with php? Like this:
http://www.example.com/some-directory/some-page.html
http://www.example.com/some-directory/some-page.html
http://www.example.com/some-directory/some-page.html
http://www.example.com/some-directory/some-page.html
http://www.example.com/some-directory/some-page.html
I have one method (found online) that works well with a single url, but when looping over multiple urls, it only works with the final url in the array. For your reference, the method is this:
function get_web_page( $url )
{
$options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true, // return web page
CURLOPT_HEADER => true, // return headers
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true, // follow redirects
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "", // handle all encodings
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "spider", // who am i
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true, // set referer on redirect
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120, // timeout on connect
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120, // timeout on response
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10, // stop after 10 redirects
);
$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( $ch );
//$header['errno'] = $err;
//$header['errmsg'] = $errmsg;
//$header['content'] = $content;
print($header[0]);
return $header;
}
//Using the above method in a for loop
$finalURLs = array();
$lineCount = count($shortUrlArray);
for($i = 0; $i <= $lineCount; $i++){
$singleShortURL = $shortUrlArray[$i];
$myUrlInfo = get_web_page( $singleShortURL );
$rawURL = $myUrlInfo["url"];
array_push($finalURLs, $rawURL);
}
Close, but not enough
This method works, but only with a single url. I Can't use it in a for loop which is what I want to do. When used in the above example in a for loop, the first four elements come back unchanged, and only the final element is converted into its final url. This happens whether your array is 5 elements or 500 elements long.
Solution Sought:
Please give me a hint as to how you'd modify this method to work when used inside of a for loop with collection of urls (Rather than just one).
-OR-
If you know of code that is better suited for this task, please include it in your answer.
Thanks in advance.
Update:
After some further prodding I've found that the problem lies not in the above method (which, after all, seems to work fine in for loops) but possibly encoding. When I hard-code an array of short urls, the loop works fine. But when I pass in a block of newline-seperated urls from an html form using GET or POST, the above mentioned problem ensues. Are the urls somehow being changed into a format not compatible with the method when I submit the form????
New Update:
You guys, I've found that my problem was due to something unrelated to the above method. My problem was that the URL encoding of my short urls converted what i thought were just newline characters (separating the urls) into this: %0D%0A which is a line feed or return character... And that all short urls save for the final url in the collection had a "ghost" character appended to the tail, thus making it impossible to retrieve the final urls for those only. I identified the ghost character, corrected my php explode, and all works fine now. Sorry and thanks.
