Question

Possible Duplicate:
php short hash

MD5 hashes are long and inconvenient to use. How can I further encode a md5 string to produce a shorter string using a subset of characters, for example a-z, A-Z and 0-9?
jsfiddle.net is doing something like this on their website to produce short links easy to copy and paste and look like this: http://jsfiddle.net/uY7Pk/

Answer 1

1. Generate a random N-character string.
2. See if anything else already has that string as its shorturl in the database.
3. If yes, go to 1. If no, store that string as the shorturl for the resource in the database.

There’s no need to use hashing for url shorteners when you have a persistent datastore, because you’re not actually encoding the long url, you’re just associating a token with it.