Question

I am just learning python and is interested in how this can be accomplished. During the search for the answer, I came across this service: http://www.longurlplease.com

For example:

http://bit.ly/rgCbf can be converted to:

http://webdesignledger.com/freebies/the-best-social-media-icons-all-in-one-place

I did some inspecting with Firefox and see that the original url is not in the header.

Answer 1

Enter urllib2, which offers the easiest way of doing this:

>>> import urllib2 >>> fp = urllib2.urlopen('http://bit.ly/rgCbf') >>> fp.geturl() 'http://webdesignledger.com/freebies/the-best-social-media-icons-all-in-one-place' 

For reference’s sake, however, note that this is also possible with httplib:

>>> import httplib >>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection('bit.ly') >>> conn.request('HEAD', '/rgCbf') >>> response = conn.getresponse() >>> response.getheader('location') 'http://webdesignledger.com/freebies/the-best-social-media-icons-all-in-one-place' 

And with PycURL, although I’m not sure if this is the best way to do it using it:

>>> import pycurl >>> conn = pycurl.Curl() >>> conn.setopt(pycurl.URL, 'http://bit.ly/rgCbf') >>> conn.setopt(pycurl.FOLLOWLOCATION, 1) >>> conn.setopt(pycurl.CUSTOMREQUEST, 'HEAD') >>> conn.setopt(pycurl.NOBODY, True) >>> conn.perform() >>> conn.getinfo(pycurl.EFFECTIVE_URL) 'http://webdesignledger.com/freebies/the-best-social-media-icons-all-in-one-place'