Question

I have the following code:

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.site.com/check.php?id=1");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)");
$curlData = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
echo $curlData;

the script on the remote site will perform a certain check, and according to the check results it redirect to a small 15×15 gif image.

At the moment I have CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1 which means it will follow the redirection to the gif and when I echo $curlData I get the binary code of the image which is not what I want.

Is it possible to have curl display where the script tries to redirect me without actually following the redirect? So I can tell to which gif image it redirect me to instead of echoing the gif content?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Easily! Don’t set CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, and then read the Location header from the response.

Edit: So, a bit more detail. The headers will be the lines of the response just after the status line, separated with \r\n. You’ll need to break up these lines, and look for the line prefixed with Location:. This is a string parsing exercise – nothing terribly exciting or tricky. You can use curl_getinfo with the CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE flag to discover the total length of the header portion of the response.