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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T10:15:54+00:00

I’m currently working on a research project that needs to collect checkin tweets from

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I’m currently working on a research project that needs to collect checkin tweets from Twitter.

A crawler has been implemented and tweets I got are in the format like: “I’m at SOMEWHERE 4sq.com/xW1q**”

When click on the link “4sq.com/xW1q**”, the page will be redirect to URL like “foursquare.com/SOMEONE/checkin/CHECKINID&SIGNATURE“. I need to extract the CHECKINID and SIGNATURE in order to get detailed checkin infomation.

What I want to ask is that how can I program to expand the shorter URL to the longer URL in order to obtain the checkin ID and a signature ? Someone suggest that I should make a HEAD request to get the the full URL, but I don’t know how to it.

Thanks in advance.

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  1. Editorial Team

    New more correct answer

    4sq.com uses bit.ly to shorten URLs, so you should use the bit.ly API to expand the URL: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation

    A HEAD request is the right thing to do.

    To do a HEAD request in curl:

    curl -i -X HEAD http://4sq.com/abcdefg

    Which returns the headers like so:

    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:26:02 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
...other headers...
Location: <<<FULL URL>>>

    If you tell us more about what language you’re coding in we can give you more specific advice about how to make a HEAD request and get that header value.

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