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Revision: 66464
at May 12, 2014 02:49 by olive
Initial Code 
< ?php
$url = "http://tinyurl.com/2dfmty";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HEADER,true);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,false);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
$pdata = http_parse_headers($data);
echo "Short URL: {$url}<br/>";
echo "Original URL: {$pdata['Location']}";
 
 
function http_parse_headers( $header )
    {
        $retVal = array();
        $fields = explode("\r\n", preg_replace('/\x0D\x0A[\x09\x20]+/', ' ', $header));
        foreach( $fields as $field ) {
            if( preg_match('/([^:]+): (.+)/m', $field, $match) ) {
                $match[1] = preg_replace('/(?< =^|[\x09\x20\x2D])./e', 'strtoupper("")', strtolower(trim($match[1])));
                if( isset($retVal[$match[1]]) ) {
                    $retVal[$match[1]] = array($retVal[$match[1]], $match[2]);
                } else {
                    $retVal[$match[1]] = trim($match[2]);
                }
            }
        }
        return $retVal;
    }
?>

now you see that the output of this code is

Short URL: http://tinyurl.com/2dfmty 
Original URL: http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/embiggen/
Initial URL 
http://hasin.me/2009/05/05/expanding-short-urls-to-original-urls-using-php-and-curl/
Initial Description 
there are numbers of url shortening services available these days, including the good old tinyurl and something really short like u.nu. now when you get the short url shortened by using any of these services, you dont know where your browser is taking you! so if you are interested to figure out the original url hiding behind these short url, you need to have a little knowledge on how these services actually work. if you go to any of these short urls, they tell your browser “HTTP 30X: Object has moved” HTTP HEADER (optionally, some does it, some doesn’t) and then asks your browser to move to the original url using “Location” in HTTP HEADER. so all you have to do is just get the HTTP HEADER out first (PHP and Curl is pretty good at doing this, heh heh) and then parse the “Location” parameter from it.

lets see how that works in code
Initial Title 
expanding short url to original url using PHP and CURL
Initial Tags 

                                

                                                            

                                    

                                        

                                        Initial Language
                                        

                                    

                                    
PHP