PHP: cURL and keep track of all redirections

Question

I'm looking to cURL a URL and keep track of each individual URL it goes through. For some reason I am unable to accomplish this without doing recursive cURL calls which is not ideal. Perhaps I am missing some easy option. Thoughts?

 $url = "some url with redirects";
 $ch = curl_init($url);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, false);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061024 BonEcho/2.0");

 $html = curl_exec($ch);
 $info = array();
 if(!curl_errno($ch))
 {
      $info = curl_getinfo($ch);
      echo "<pre>";
      print_r($info);
      echo "</pre>";
 }

and I get a response like this

Array
(
    [url] => THE LAST URL THAT WAS HIT
    [content_type] => text/html; charset=utf-8
    [http_code] => 200
    [header_size] => 1942
    [request_size] => 1047
    [filetime] => -1
    [ssl_verify_result] => 0
    [redirect_count] => 2   <---- I WANT THESE
    [total_time] => 0.799589
    [namelookup_time] => 0.000741
    [connect_time] => 0.104206
    [pretransfer_time] => 0.104306
    [size_upload] => 0
    [size_download] => 49460
    [speed_download] => 61856
    [speed_upload] => 0
    [download_content_length] => 49460
    [upload_content_length] => 0
    [starttransfer_time] => 0.280781
    [redirect_time] => 0.400723
)

Answer 1

With libcurl, you can use the CURLINFO_REDIRECT_URL getinfo variable to find out the URL it would have redirected to if it was enabled. This allows programs to easily traverse the redirects themselves.

This approach is much better and easier than the parsing of Location: headers the others have suggested here, as then your code must rebuild relative paths etc. CURLINFO_REDIRECT_URL fixes that for you automatically.

The PHP/CURL binding added support for this feature in PHP 5.3.7:

$url = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_REDIRECT_URL)

The commit that fixed this:

https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/689268a0ba4259c8f199cae6343b3d17cab9b6a5