Create a TinyURL with PHP

Written by David Walsh on Tuesday, December 23, 2008

TinyURL is an awesome service. For those who don’t know what TinyURL is, TinyURL allows you to take a long URL like “http://davidwalsh.name/jquery-link-nudging” and turn it into “http://tinyurl.com/67c4se”. Using the PHP and TinyURL API, you can create these tiny URLs on the fly!

The PHP

//gets the data from a URL  
function get_tiny_url($url)  
{  
	$ch = curl_init();  
	$timeout = 5;  
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url);  
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);  
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);  
	$data = curl_exec($ch);  
	curl_close($ch);  
	return $data;  
}

//test it out!
$new_url = get_tiny_url('http://davidwalsh.name/php-imdb-information-grabber');

//returns http://tinyurl.com/65gqpp
echo $new_url

Simply provide the URL and you’ll received the new, tiny URL in return. If you use Twitter, you’ll have noticed that Twitter automates tiny URL creation for URLs in tweets.

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Follow via RSS Epic Discussion

December 23 / #

Rich says:

David, great post as always. you are starting to get me creeped out, because I was thinking about something like this yesterday. and now I dont have to reinvent the wheel.

amazing!

December 23 / #

feir says:

Thanks a lot for this trick. It is very usable.

December 24 / #

bigbrother says:

Seems you can even use is.gd in much the same way http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=

Link to the API info. http://is.gd/api_info.php
I like is.gd a bit more than tinyurl because the urls are smaller.

December 25 / #

meir says:

use file_get_contents:

<?php
function tinyurl($url) {
return file_get_contents(‘http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=’.$url);
}
?>

January 04 / #

patriotfan says:

I’m so confused
I tested it out on my site and it works great.
But where is it getting the $url from?

January 13 / #

Daniel says:

Why not use this

January 13 / #

Daniel says:

Sry…

<?php
function tiny_url($url){
return file_get_contents(‘http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=’ . $url);
}
$url = ‘http://www.url.com/’;
echo tiny_url($url);
?>

January 27 / #

php kursu says:

thank you

March 26 / #

tx8 says:

Clear, fast and easy.Thank you :)

April 14 / #

Jonas Lejon says:

Hey David! I’ve just release an API for to.ly:

PHP Code sample:

function CompressURL($url) {

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, “http://to.ly/api.php?longurl=”.urlencode($url));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

$html = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);

return $html;

}

echo CompressURL(“http://twitter.com”); // Test

May 28 / #

pampers says:

hai alll….thanks for the tricksss…. if i use daniel’s sample….my page take a bit long to load….. hmmm any other way to prevent this???

thanksss

July 13 / #

Jerome says:

Thank you, I used it!

September 18 / #

mark edwards says:

it worked out of the box!

next improvement – tinyurl lets us “customize” the url with an optional alias – think we can add this somehow?

October 04 / #

Mohamed Sanaulla says:

@Daniel: It works fine. But when the server has diabled the file_get_contents() it will create problems. I had the same problem. But when i used cURL() it worked fine.