Get header information by PHP curl

References: 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11659460/get-header-information-from-php-curl-post-request

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9183178/php-curl-retrieving-response-headers-and-body-in-a-single-request

If you want to get the headers, set the option CURLOPT_HEADER to 1, and the HTTP response you get back from curl_exec() will contain the headers. You can them parse them for the location.

$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); // return HTTP headers with response
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); // return the response rather than output it

$resp = curl_exec($ch);

list($headers, $response) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $resp, 2);
// $headers now has a string of the HTTP headers
// $response is the body of the HTTP response

$headers = explode("\n", $headers);
foreach($headers as $header) {
    if (stripos($header, 'Location:') !== false) {
        echo "The location header is: '$header'";
    }
}