Make curl follow redirects?

Question

I'm trying to make curl follow a redirect but I can't quite get it to work right. I have a string that I want to send as a GET param to a server and get the resulting URL.

---

Example:
String = Kobold Vermin
Url = www.wowhead.com/search?q=Kobold+Worker

If you go to that url it will redirect you to www.wowhead.com/npc=257. I want curl to return this url to my php code so that i can extract the npc=257 and use it.

---

Current code:

function npcID($name) {
    $urltopost = "http://www.wowhead.com/search?q=" . $name;
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $urltopost);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.wowhead.com");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded"));
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
    return curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
}

This however returns www.wowhead.com/search?q=Kobold+Worker and not www.wowhead.com/npc=257.

I suspect php is returning before the external redirect happens. How can I fix this?

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Erm... I don't think you're actually executing the curl... Try:

curl_exec($ch);

...after setting the options, and before the curl_getinfo() call.

EDIT: If you just want to find out where a page redirects to, I'd use the advice here, and just use Curl to grab the headers and extract the Location: header from them:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$a = curl_exec($ch);
if(preg_match('#Location: (.*)#', $a, $r))
 $l = trim($r[1]);