Hi all,

I have a question involving redirection of URLs. Suppose I am using LWP::UserAgent to send a GET/HEAD request to a URL. But that URL1 may be forwarding to URL2, which may be forwarding to URL3 and so on. So after several redirections we are hitting the final URLn. I want to be able to find out what that final URLn is. Does LWP::UserAgent or any other Perl module keep track of this information? Currently what I am doing is this:

********************************************************* 
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->timeout(5);


my $request = HTTP::Request->new(HEAD => $URL1);
my $response = $ua->request($request);
print $response->base, "\n";

[download]
*********************************************************

This works in most cases and returns the final URLn but sometimes it doesn't work. For example, suppose the final URLn is http://cnn.com/technology/internet/google.html

When I call the $response->base method, I am getting back the URL "cnn.com" rather than the full URL as displayed above. So some sites report the base URL to be the top-level domain and not the actual URL containing the data. On the other hand, LWP::UserAgent must clearly know what the full final URL is b/c it has to fetch the data from it. Is that information on the final URLn stored anywhere into the HTTP::Response object or HTTP::Headers object return as part of the usage of LWP::UserAgent?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

In reply to URL redirection and final URL by haidut

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