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Create Short URLs Using U.Nu

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I was recently referred to another URL shortening website called u.nu. As far as shortening services go, u.nu seems to have the field beat as far as the shortest base URL. If you're really intent on creating the shortest possible URLs, look no further than u.nu's API.

The PHP

	function get_unu_url($url)
	{
		$url = 'http://u.nu/unu-api-simple?url='.urlencode($url);
		$ch = curl_init();  
		$timeout = 5;  
		curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);  
		curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);  
		curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);  
		$url = curl_exec($ch);  
		curl_close($ch);
		return trim($url);
	}
	
	$short_url = get_unu_url('https://davidwalsh.name');
	//returns http://u.nu/92e

That's it. I love that there's no XML or JSON involved with their API. What's returned is the URL and nothing more!

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Discussion

  1. Cerium

    Nice snippet David ! Thanks.

    But it’s strange, a domain name can have just one letter, “u” in this case ? I always think the minimum was two.

  2. Mark Sanborn

    Now if only they had analytics tracking…

  3. Alex

    “Domain names can be as short as one character. A premium of €500/yr applies to name registrations of one character in length, €250 for domain names of two-character length, and €30 per year for domain names of any other length. In June, 2008, .NU Domain began permitting registration of all-numeric domain names.”

    from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nu

    Unfortunately all one character domains are already bought :(

  4. Guillermo Rauch

    Wow! It seems the create API adds additional whitespace / carriage return though. Might want to additionally trim() the result.
    I integrated it into PHPShortener

  5. David Walsh

    Thank you for reporting that Guillermo! Updated.

  6. Cerium

    @Alex : thanks, it seems to be specific to dot nu :)

  7. Drew Douglass

    Hey David,

    Nice work here, I had never heard of that particular url service, thanks for that. I was going to ask though, couldn’t you shorten it down to something like this?

    function get_unu_url($url)
{    
    $url = file_get_contents('http://u.nu/unu-api-simple?url='.urlencode($url));
    return $url;
}
echo get_unu_url('http://davidwalsh.name');

    Or was the reason because file_get_contents may not be available to everyone? I ask simply out of curiosity :)

    Thanks again!

  8. David Walsh

    @Drew Douglass: You can definitely use file_get_contents(). cURL is simply PHP best practice. Here’s a good resource:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/555523/filegetcontents-vs-curl-what-has-better-performance

  9. Drew Douglass

    Thanks for the link David, that is very helpful.

  10. Mahmud Ahsan

    awesome post.

  11. cfc

    You may want to note in your post that this service no longer appears to exist.

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