[Python] How to get full url from shortened url

Sometimes when you scrape a website, you may have encountered the fact that the website returns shortened URLs to sources from other websites.

As in this case, for example, https://upflix.pl/r/Qb64Ar this link consists of a domain and some random characters. The way a shortened link works is that it redirects you to another page. Therefore, the status_code that our query returns is 302

Sometimes it happens that we need a full URL to get that can do this with a few lines of Python code and the requests library.

pip install requests

We will use the head method to perform this function
This method is similar to get with the difference that it does not return any content, only headers.

response = requests.head(short_url)

After executing the query, we can check the headers that were returned.
There is information here such as:

• date
• type of website content
• character encoding
• FULL LINK and many other information you can see below.

{'Date': 'Thu, 16 Nov 2023 00:43:13 GMT', 'Content-Type': 'text/html; charset=UTF-8', 'Connection': 'keep-alive', 'location': 'https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14060708/', 'vary': 'Origin', 'x-powered-by': 'PHP/7.3.33', 'x-frame-options': 'SAMEORIGIN', 'CF-Cache-Status': 'DYNAMIC', 'Report-To': '{"endpoints":[{"url":"https:\\/\\/a.nel.cloudflare.com\\/report\\/v3?s=bgvCMcMQg1ZkjanlgqzemKUHHthalhb%2FAT72Q58O8a22eFmkeb%2FyeeIMfKkGFwt8WmkMB6dv28F1G2CdH134Kilk%2BcdQNweIZ3O%2FN9KlQf1A2VF%2Bm3yYT89rvjU%3D"}],"group":"cf-nel","max_age":604800}', 'NEL': '{"success_fraction":0,"report_to":"cf-nel","max_age":604800}', 'Strict-Transport-Security': 'max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains; preload', 'X-Content-Type-Options': 'nosniff', 'Server': 'cloudflare', 'CF-RAY': '826bb2ce597ebfda-WAW', 'alt-svc': 'h3=":443"; ma=86400'}

Full code

import requests
from typing import Optional 

def get_full_url(short_url: str) -> Optional[str]
    response = requests.head(short_url)
    if response.status_code == 302:
        headers = response.headers
        return headers["location"]

    return None 

Comments

[Ivan Zakutnii]

import requests

full_url = requests.get("https://shorturl.at/cikuPxx").url

It will return either the full URL or an alternative string, depending on the shortener provider. Typically, this alternative string is the shortener service URL if the link is broken.

[Recluse]

missing optional import from typing and colon after optional

from typing import Optional
import requests
def get_full_url(short_url: str) -> Optional[str]: