Jsoup - get number of redirects (http 301 or 302)

In this article I would like to show how to get the number of redirects with Jsoup Java library.

I didn't find any easy way to get this number, but I needed to make it done for unit tests. I need to have max 1 redirect to final URL. It can be accomplished by using reflection and making internal priavte Jsoup variable public. The variable name is: numRedirects and it is not accessible from Jsoup API level.

I found it by digging into the Jsoup internals, because I couldn't find any answer on the internet.

On below example the number of redirects is 1 and status code is 302 (HTTP response status code 302 Found).

Quick solution:

private static int getRedirectsNumber(org.jsoup.Connection.Response response)
        throws NoSuchFieldException, IllegalAccessException {

    // we use reflection to make numRedirects public
    Field field = response.getClass().getDeclaredField("numRedirects");
    field.setAccessible(true);

    return (int) field.get(response);
}

Practical example

Full working code example:

import org.jsoup.Connection;
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;

import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import java.net.URL;

public class JsoupRedirections {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        String url = "https://dirask.com/posts/1X9GgD";

        Connection connection = Jsoup.connect(url)
                .followRedirects(true)
                .userAgent("Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, " +
                        "like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.4 Safari/537.36")
                .method(Connection.Method.GET)
                .timeout(10_000); // 10 sec

        Connection.Response response = connection.execute();
        
        int redirectsNumber = getRedirectsNumber(response);
        System.out.println("redirects number: " + redirectsNumber); // 1

        URL resultUrl = response.url();

        // https://dirask.com/posts/Jsoup-get-number-of-redirects-http-301-or-302-1X9GgD
        System.out.println(resultUrl);
    }

    private static int getRedirectsNumber(Connection.Response response) 
            throws NoSuchFieldException, IllegalAccessException {

        // we use reflection to make numRedirects public
        Field field = response.getClass().getDeclaredField("numRedirects");
        field.setAccessible(true);

        return (int) field.get(response);
    }
}

Output:

redirects number: 1
https://dirask.com/posts/Jsoup-get-number-of-redirects-http-301-or-302-1X9GgD

Maven dependency for Jsoup version 1.11.3: (attach it to *.pom file):

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.jsoup/jsoup -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jsoup</groupId>
    <artifactId>jsoup</artifactId>
    <version>1.11.3</version>
</dependency>

Explaination

This section shows where number of redirects is placed inside Jsoup library. Above solution extracted the value with reflection.

The Jsoup Response internals:

public class HttpConnection implements Connection {

    // ...

    public static class Response extends HttpConnection.Base<Connection.Response> implements Connection.Response {
        private static final int MAX_REDIRECTS = 20;
        private static SSLSocketFactory sslSocketFactory;
        private static final String LOCATION = "Location";
        private int statusCode;
        private String statusMessage;
        private ByteBuffer byteData;
        private InputStream bodyStream;
        private String charset;
        private String contentType;
        private boolean executed = false;
        private boolean inputStreamRead = false;
        private int numRedirects = 0;             // <-------------------- num redirects 
        private Connection.Request req;

        // ...

Screenshot: