Anyway to shorten URL via PHP FORM?

Question

I currently have people filling out a form with the following information:

1. Your Name
2. Recipient Name
3. Message
4. Amount

I'm wondering how I can get when they fill out this information, it inputs it into a link.. for example this is the code I'm using right now which works:

http://mywebsite.com/picture.php?to=" . $rname . "&from=" . $sname . "&message=" . $message . "&amount=" . $amount .

I'm wondering now how I can get that link to be shorter? Maybe with a TINY URL API or something? But how would I go about doing that?

Answer 1

As you've already highlighted, the best way to do this is via an API. It's actually quite easy to use the Tiny URL API if you have CURL installed:

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!
$your_url = 'http://mywebsite.com/picture.php?to=' . $rname . '&from=' . $sname . '&message=' . $message . '&amount=' . $amount;
$short_url = get_tiny_url($your_url);

//returns your tiny url
echo $short_url;

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