Given an Apple News URL, prints the original URL for the story.

AppleNewsURLRedirect.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Given an Apple News URL, prints the original URL for the story.
#
# Usage:
#	% AppleNewsURLRedirect.pl 'https://apple.news/Ae78KIEmMOHCVXD4VA7ysKw'
#		or
#	% echo 'https://apple.news/Ae78KIEmMOHCVXD4VA7ysKw' | AppleNewsURLRedirect.pl
#
# Author: John Gruber  <https://daringfireball.net/>
#
# 13 Nov 2018
#	Initial version.
#
# Todo: Should probably take a list of Apple News URLs, not just one.
#

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple;

# Try ARGV first
my $apple_news_url = $ARGV[0];

# Try STDIN next (trying STDIN first won't work, will take input from terminal)
unless (defined $apple_news_url) {
	$apple_news_url = <STDIN>;
}

unless( defined $apple_news_url && $apple_news_url =~ m{https://apple.news/\S+}) {
	print "Usage: AppleNewsURLRedirect.pl 'https://apple.news/article_id'";
	exit;
}

my $content = get($apple_news_url);
die "Couldn't get '$apple_news_url'" unless defined $content;

# $content is an HTML page. Pretty easy to scrape the redirect URL
# from the JavaScript, but this could easily break in the future.
$content =~ m{redirectToUrl\("(.+)"\);};
my $redirect_url = $1;
print $redirect_url;