Comments on: How to create URL shortener using PHP

By: Jeyaganesh

Jeyaganesh — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 15:06:39 +0000

Thanks Tony for pointing out the errors.

By: Tony P

Tony P — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:22:54 +0000

Nice script but two suggestions:

1) You might want to do some validation on the long URL to make sure the user didn’t forget http:// or that it doesn’t get a 404 error.

2) I ran a simple script that generated 1,000 shortened URLs using this method and got at least 3 or 4 duplicates every time I ran it. You might want to create a function to ensure the generated shorturl is unique in the database otherwise you’re going to run into some problems.

Good job otherwise…thanks for the post!

By: Jeyaganesh

Jeyaganesh — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:54:49 +0000

I agree Chris,this could be a good tutorial for php beginners.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:16:44 +0000

Generating an ID based on a random number could easily created two IDs that are the same.

By: mathechr

mathechr — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:00:40 +0000

How did you get it to work? I’m getting the same error….

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:17:35 +0000

Hello! Thanks for this script! But there is a problem: when i’m pressing “short” it’s only shows me a text of shorten.php. What is wrong?
P.s. Can you give me a code of mysql table for this script, please?

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:45:02 +0000

Why is this using an random integer for the database id, shouldn’t the database decide on that? What if they clash? It’s not checking if it exists before attempting to use it, and anyway, why not just have SQL auto increment the ID? If you need to know the id for the encryption, (not that that’s a good idea), but you’d use mysql_insert_id(); to find out what auto increment value the database used.

Every part of your tutorial is really amateur coding, you should probably have mentioned that in your post somewhere, before others learn anything from it.

By: Jeyaganesh

Jeyaganesh — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 06:45:44 +0000

It depends on base-convert function and the number of digits you specify in the rand() function. Thanks.

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:50:50 +0000

How can you make the key longer than 4 characters ei up to 5 or 6

By: Jeyaganesh

Jeyaganesh — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:10:04 +0000

Rob,

There was a typo in the code,Now I have corrected it.Please download the code and try again.

Thanks.