PHP CURL & Tiny URL

Here’s how to use PHP CURL and the TinyURL api to generate tiny urls on the fly. This is a similar tutorial to the one I wrote a while back on using the Twitter API

I’ve set the variable $maketiny as the url that you want to shorten. This then gets passed into the function and processed with CURL. CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER returns the value of curl_exec($ch); as a string and doesn’t just display it on the screen allowing us to process the data further.

//the url you want to make tiny
$maketiny = 'http://www.papermashup.com';

function make_tiny($url)
{
	$ch = curl_init();
	$timeout = 5;
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,'http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	return $data;
}
$tinyurl = make_tiny(''.$maketiny.'');

php echo $tinyurl; ?>