Creating Small Urls with PHP

Have you ever wanted to create small URLs like in Twitter? This service is provided by bit.ly and it is the one I normally use for my projects. It allows you to shorten any long URL (ie. http://www.ramirezcobos.com = http://bit.ly/8zivPq -click on it and you will be redirected here) and also gives you click statistiques.

Nevertheless, there are also other providers that allows you to create a small URL on the fly such as tinyurl.com or to.y. If any of you wishes to create small urls through their PHP code here I got a set of functions (using CURL) for you use on your projects:

function getTinyUrl($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 $data;
	}
function getToLyUrl($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);

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

		return $data;
	}

Usage

$smallURL = getTinyUrl('http://www.ramirezcobos.com');

echo $smallURL; // will display the small URL

Extras

I include the following function too just in case, as I recommend you to check if URLs are in correct format before using the above functions.

function getParsedUrl($url)
	{
		$parsed_url = parse_url($url);

		if (!isset($parsed_url['scheme']) or $parsed_url['scheme'] != 'http'){
			echo 'Unsupported URL sheme given, please just use "HTTP".';
			exit();
		}
		if (!isset($parsed_url['host']) or $parsed_url['host'] == ''){
			echo 'Invalid URL given!';
			exit();
		}

		$host = $parsed_url['host'];
		$host .= (isset($parsed_url['port']) and  !empty($parsed_url['port'])) ? ':'.$parsed_url['port'] : '';
		$path = (isset($parsed_url['path']) and  !empty($parsed_url['path'])) ? $parsed_url['path'] : '/';
		$path .= (isset($parsed_url['query']) and  !empty($parsed_url['query'])) ? '?'.$parsed_url['query'] : '';

		return 'http://' . $host . $path;
	}