Question

I am trying to parse a page which contains some links. These links, if followed, will redirect to some files to download.

For example, <a href="http://example.com/file.php"> Download </a> which redirects to <a href="http://example.com/1.pdf".

I don’t want to download the file, I just want to get the file link (int this case http://example.com/1.pdf).

I am trying this:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, FALSE);     // Return in string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_exec($ch);
var_dump(curl_getinfo($ch));

But, it gives me the file contents.

Does anyone have any idea how to this?

==EDIT==
Thank you guys. I solved it like this:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, TRUE);
curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);

Now, $info contains the header and I can the link from it.

Answer 1

The reason the output is being sent to the screen is because you’re telling cURL to do so. If you want to store the response in a variable the following line:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, FALSE);

should read:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);

Then, actually retrieve the returned output from curl_exec like so:

$output = curl_exec($ch);

Once you have the returned HTML content from the remote page in the $output variable you can use DOM^docs or regex (but preferably DOM) to parse out any information you want.

UPDATE

I can’t tell because the question is vaguely worded: is there actually a Location header redirect happening? If so, you’ll want to do as @heiko suggests to prevent cURL from following the redirect and retrieve the headers. Then you can easily parse the contents of the location header:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER, TRUE); // add header output