Question

i’m using an open api which works with session ids.
A little background:
A user enters my site and get’s a url and session:
domain.tld/somelongsessionhash (which is usually 50 characters long)
A user can now share this url to do some collab work on a file.

i now want to to shorten the somelongsessionhash which i get from the api-service.

i thought i could do it this way:

1. Save the somelongsessionhash in the db
2. Generate my own shorter hash
3. If the own shorter url gets called, php checks the db and gets the real session.

I’m new to php and would love to solve this. Any hints appreciated! 🙂

Answer 1

Well, I’ll give you a short example of what you can do.

Let’s say you store your hash in temporary variable ($hash).
To generate a short string for your URL you can use something like this:

$short_hash = substr(str_shuffle($hash), 0, 8);

Use that variable and store the value in DB. The only thing left to do is to check if the current URL( http://www.example.com/f65fcb33/ – for example) matches a record in your DB, and do whatever you want.

This is just a sample method, you can always search internet for something more to expand.