Question

In PHP, how can I replicate the expand/contract feature for Tinyurls as on search.twitter.com?

Answer 1

If you want to find out where a tinyurl is going, use fsockopen to get a connection to tinyurl.com on port 80, and send it an HTTP request like this

GET /dmsfm HTTP/1.0 Host: tinyurl.com 

The response you get back will look like

HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently Connection: close X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6 Location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL Content-type: text/html Content-Length: 0 Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:29:04 GMT Server: TinyURL/1.6 

example code…

<?php $tinyurl='dmsfm';  $fp = fsockopen('tinyurl.com', 80, $errno, $errstr, 30); if (!$fp) {     echo '$errstr ($errno)<br />\n'; } else {     $out = 'GET /$tinyurl HTTP/1.0\r\n';     $out .= 'Host: tinyurl.com\r\n';     $out .= 'Connection: Close\r\n\r\n';      $response='';      fwrite($fp, $out);     while (!feof($fp)) {         $response.=fgets($fp, 128);     }     fclose($fp);      //now parse the Location: header out of the response  } ?>