Question

I’m trying to find the best way (in code) to determine the final destination of a shortened URL. For instance http://tinyurl.com redirects to an eBay auction. I’m trying to get the URL for the eBay auction. I’m trying to do this from within .NET so I can compare multiple URLs to ensure that there is no duplicates.

TIA

Answer 1

While I spent a minute writing the code to ensure that it worked the answer was already delivered, but I post the code anyway:

private static string GetRealUrl(string url)
{
    WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
    request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Head;
    WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
    return response.ResponseUri.ToString();
}

This will work as long as the short url service does a regular redirect.