Question

I need to convert a string of text containing a long url into the same string but with a tinyurl (using the tinyurl api). eg. convert

blah blah blah http://example.com/news/sport blah blah blah

into

blah blah blah http://tinyurl.com/yaeocnv blah blah blah

How can it be done?

Answer 1

In order to shorten an arbitrary number of URLs in your text, put the API stuff in a function which takes the long URL and returns the short URL. Then apply this function via PHP’s preg_replace_callback function to your text. This would look something like this:

<?php

function shorten_url($matches) {
    // EDIT: the preg function will supply an array with all submatches
    $long_url = $matches[0];

    // API stuff here...
    $url = "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=$long_url";
    return file_get_contents($url);
}

$text = 'I have a link to http://www.example.com in this string';

$textWithShortURLs = preg_replace_callback('|http://([a-z0-9?./=%#]{1,500})|i', 'shorten_url', $text);
echo $textWithShortURLs;

?>

Don’t count on that pattern too much, just wrote it on-the-fly without any testing, maybe someone else can help.
See http://php.net/preg-replace-callback