Question

my curl function cannot follow the redirection of Facebook external link redirector, l.php and i have no idea what’s wrong…

here is the code that i’m working on and i commented the lines that i’ve tried… and an example link (http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DGvhFyNLK66A%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&h=xAQFD_3svAQFKxF5YrtqNQ5cL3lIQxo0uaC9PoB7qAvG7Yw&enc=AZPxNZ8P5q54FREC37UC_MP02pwh2DOmsI5bbFkoQm5VUPUlYeNzQASjarRjhTtcedRkmM3mDjK7J_r_P5pRpYhL)

function connect($u) {
$ch= curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $u);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT, true);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'spie');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10);
$source=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $source;
}

thank you..

Answer 1

I first thought this was a redirect issue with cURL (safe mode enabled for instance). But it actually comes from how Facebook redirector works.

There is no Location: header, so curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); won’t help you with it.

The Facebook link page actually redirects you using Javascript:

<script type="text/javascript">document.location.replace("http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GvhFyNLK66A&feature=youtu.be");</script>

cURL cannot analyse the content of the page nor execute javascript so this is exepcted behaviour. If you still want to do this, you’ll need to parse the content of the page, grab the URL from the javascript, and issue an new cURL request to this URL.