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phpcurlsoundcloudmeta-tagshttp-status-code-301

Grab Soundcloud artwork with plain PHP

I want to grab the URL of the artwork associated with a Soundcloud track with plain PHP without using their API. The HTML page has an og:image meta tag property which fits perfectly for my needs.

For example, the meta property of track https://soundcloud.com/dengue/sets/nuevos-sonidos looks like that:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000077991135-u5nvu1-t500x500.jpg">

The problem is that the HTTP request returns an 301 Moved Permanently code and so the use of DOMDocument class loadHTMLFile function gives an error.

Solution

  • If you really don't want to use their API (which seems like a bad call, because you don't need to do ANY auth; it's completely open), you can do some easy hacks.

    I'm not getting any redirects from cURL

    ~ $ curl -v https://soundcloud.com/dengue/sets/nuevos-sonidos
*   Trying 68.232.44.127...
* Connected to soundcloud.com (68.232.44.127) port 443 (#0)
* TLS 1.2 connection using TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
* Server certificate: *.soundcloud.com
* Server certificate: GlobalSign Domain Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
* Server certificate: GlobalSign Root CA
> GET /dengue/sets/nuevos-sonidos HTTP/1.1
> Host: soundcloud.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.43.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
< Content-Type: text/html
< Date: Sat, 07 May 2016 03:42:20 GMT
< Server: am/2
< Set-Cookie: sc_anonymous_id=363279-961735-991413-425081; path=/; expires=Tue, 05 May 2026 03:42:20 GMT; domain=.soundcloud.com
< Via: sssr
< X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
< Content-Length: 47003
<

    But if you are, you just have to add this option before you make the cURL from PHP:

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

    If you're seriously into the hacking business, why don't you just do this:

    <?php

$url = `curl -L https://soundcloud.com/dengue/sets/nuevos-sonidos 2>/dev/null | grep 'og:image' | sed 's/.*og:image" content="\\([^"]*\\).*/\\1/'`;

echo $url;

    Which does this

    ~/Code/stack-overflow $ php hack.php
https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000077991135-u5nvu1-t500x500.jpg