How to get a redirection response

Question

How to get the response (which is a redirect instruction) of a request from server side? For example if I put www.abc.com in the browser the browser automatically gets redirected to www.xyz.com. Now I need to get that redirect url from server side. i.e. need send a request to www.abc.com in response it returns a redirect url www.xyz.com, need to store this xyz.com. Any Idea how this can be done?

Answer 1

Here's a snippet from a web crawler that shows how to handle redirects:

  HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
  webRequest.AllowAutoRedirect = false;  // IMPORTANT
  webRequest.UserAgent = ...;
  webRequest.Timeout = 10000;           // timeout 10s

  // Get the response ...
  webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();

  // Now look to see if it's a redirect
  if ((int)webResponse.StatusCode >= 300 && (int)webResponse.StatusCode <= 399)
  {
    string uriString = webResponse.Headers["Location"];
    Console.WriteLine("Redirect to " + uriString ?? "NULL");
    webResponse.Close(); // don't forget to close it - or bad things happen!
    ...