Question

I’m in need of a function that tests a URL if it is redirected by whatever means.

So far, I have used cURL to catch header redirects, but there are obviously more ways to achieve a redirect.

Eg.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/somewhere/on/this/server" />

or JS scripts

window.location = 'http://melbourne.ag';

etc.

I was wondering if anybody has a solution that covers them all. I’ll keep working on mine and will post the result here.

Also, a quick way of parsing

<meta http-equiv="refresh"... 

in PHP anyone?

I thought this would be included in PHP’s native get_meta_tags() … but I thought wrong :/

Answer 1

Halfway there, I’ll add the JS checks when I wrote them…

 function checkRedirect($url){
    // returns the redirected URL or the original
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    $out = curl_exec($ch);

    $out = str_replace("\r", "", $out);

    $headers_end = strpos($out, "\n\n");
    if( $headers_end !== false ) { 
        $out = substr($out, 0, $headers_end);
    }   

    $headers = explode("\n", $out);
    foreach($headers as $header) {
        if(strtolower(substr($header, 0, 10)) == "location: " ) { 
            $target = substr($header, 10);
            return $target;
        }   
    }   

     return $url;
 }