How do you programmatically expand a url link to its true location?

[xarzu]

How do you programmatically expand a url link to its true location?

Do you know about tinyurl.com and baidu.com? Baidu.com is a search engine that tries to discourage people from using their web site to make metasearch engines by hiding their links in a way that is a lot like how tinyurl.com works. TinyUrl.com is a web site where, if you want to present someone with a link to something and that link is long, you can use tinyurl to produce a tiny url for presentation purposes.

Anyway, what I want to do is to find a way to programmatically take the link http://www.baidu.com/link?url=mW91GJqjJ4zBBpC8yDF8xDhiqDSn1JZjFWsHhEoSN d85PkV8Xil7qccoOX3rynaE (the first link in a search for Jessica Alba using baidu.com) and have it return the actual link, http://baike.baidu.com/view/270790.htm . That is just one example. What I want to do is not specific to Jessica but for using Baidu.com as part of my group of search engines in my meta search eneing project.

Maybe there is a way of using the WebBrowser class but I did not see a member that was the URL.

Maybe there is a way of using WebRequest and WebResponse.

[Rabbit]

You'll have to automate visiting the site and letting it resolve fully and then grab the url.

Also, the web browser class does have a URL property.

[xarzu]

@Rabbit
How does one grab the URL?

[Rabbit]

You mean from a web browser object?

webbrowser.url

[xarzu]

Is that with WPF?

With WPF:

WebBrowser webbrowser1;
 
webbrowser1.url <-- does not exist.

[Rabbit]

Here is microsoft's documentation on the url property of the web browser class.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...owser.url.aspx

[xarzu]

It is too bad I am not using windows forms

[Rabbit]

In that case, you can use the source property.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...er.source.aspx

[xarzu]

Cool.

I will give it a try.

Thanks.