final destination of a link

Is it possible to retrieve the destination of a link, when it gets redirected? Many affiliate programs use a 3rd party to pay the affiliates. To track sales the promotion of the product links to the 3rd party website.
For instance: a link would point to www.3rdpartyprocessor.com/productId/myAffiliateId when someone clicks the link they will end up at: www.producthomepage.com
Is there any way I can retrieve the second URL when I only know the first one?

I just found out that a download with cURL will download the content of the second URL. how to download a file with cURL and php
If I look thru the downloaded source I can see from which page it is, but this is because the page I retrieved contains some images coded as: src="http://www.domain.com/images/image.gif "
Surely a lot of pages retrieved will not contain the domain name in the code but just use: /images/image.gif so my problem has not been solved yet...

[curl_getinfo()]

Surely a lot of pages retrieved will not contain the domain name in the code but just use: /images/image.gif so my problem has not been solved yet...

with curl it's possible to retrieve a complete bunch of headers, check curl_getinfo()

That is exactly what I was looking for!

Code:

curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);

just before the

Code:

curl_close($ch);

shows the URL I'm looking for.

Thanks man!

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This may also be useful :

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

It will follow all the Location headers.

sounds like that could be used as well.

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Yeah, this will follow all the redirections, and then with the curl_info you can check which was the final destination.

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