Find where a t.co link goes to

twitter url-shortener
hookedonwinter picture hookedonwinter · Jun 28, 2011 · Viewed 23.5k times · Source

Given a t.co link, how can I find see where the link resolves? For example, if I have t.co/foo, I want a function or process that returns domain.com/bar.

Answer

Jonathon Hill picture Jonathon Hill · May 19, 2012

I would stay away from external APIs over which you have no control. That will simply introduce a dependency into your application that is a potential point of failure, and could cost you money to use.

CURL can do this quite nicely. Here's how I did it in PHP:

function unshorten_url($url) {
  $ch = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
    CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => TRUE,  // the magic sauce
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE,
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => FALSE, // suppress certain SSL errors
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => FALSE, 
  ));
  curl_exec($ch); 
  return curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
}

I'm sure this could be adapted to other languages or even scripted with the curl command on UNIXy systems.

http://jonathonhill.net/2012-05-18/unshorten-urls-with-php-and-curl/

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