Create a TinyURL using PHP

You can easily create a URL shortener thanks to the service called TinyURL. In this post, we'll create a PHP script that will create a TinyURL from a long URL using their API.

TinyURL is a free service that allows you to create a short URL from a long URL. For example, it can turn:

	https://sabe.io/blog/php-create-tiny-url

into:

	https://tinyurl.com/yyh5vqnv

To interface with their API, we will use the cURL library. We will make a call to their API and get back the short URL.

The function get_tiny_url, looks like this:

	function get_tiny_url($url) {
    $api_url = 'https://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=' . $url;

    $curl = curl_init();
    $timeout = 10;

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);

    $new_url = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);

    return $new_url;
}

Give the get_tiny_url function the URL you want to shorten and it will return the shortened URL using TinyURL's API.

Here's an example of a whole script:

	<?php
    function get_tiny_url($url) {
        $api_url = 'https://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=' . $url;

        $curl = curl_init();
        $timeout = 10;

        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);

        $new_url = curl_exec($curl);
        curl_close($curl);

        return $new_url;
    }

    $tiny_url = get_tiny_url('https://sabe.io/blog/php-create-tiny-url');

    echo $tiny_url;
?>

Here's the output:

	https://tinyurl.com/yyh5vqnv

Conclusion

We've created a PHP script that will create a TinyURL from a long URL using TinyURL's API. Hopefully, you can see how easy it is to create a URL shortener using PHP.

Thanks for reading!

Resources

• TinyURL
• cURL
• TinyURL API

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