Capturing TinyUrl API output into a variable

Spinethetic

function createTinyUrl($strURL) {
$tinyurl = file_get_contents("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.phpurl=".$strURL);
return $tinyurl;
}
echo(createTinyUrl('http://phpbuilder.com'));

What this snippet does is auto-generate a TinyUrl version of 'http://phpbuilder.com'.

Now I want to echo the output several times on the page, and

echo(createTinyUrl('http://phpbuilder.com'));

does exactly that, but since the page connects to the API "X" amount of times over and over again, this creates an UNBEARABLE page load time.

So how can I capture the output generated and store it in a variable so that whenever I want it displayed on my page I can just "echo $tinyurlvalue"?

Best Regards
~Ross Vaughn 🙂

Spinethetic

What an idiot I am! I was messing up the whole thing and now I realize I could just

$tinyurlvalue = (createTinyUrl('http://phpbuilder.com'));
echo "$tinyurlvalue all day long;

I really need to lay off the coffee for today, I'am on my 13th cup so far :evilgrin:

...

But yet I still plan on having more. 😃

SEObat

You can also use cURL

// Define the function to get the data from TinyUrl

function get_tiny_url($url)
{
    $ch = curl_init(); // Init cURL lib
    $timeout = 5;
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=$url"); // Set the url to be fetched
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout); // Set cURL timeout
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); // Disable print out
    $data = curl_exec($ch); // Exec
    curl_close($ch); // Close
    return $data; //Return shorted URL
}

// Test Usage

$long_url = "http://www.phpbuilder.com";
$short_url = get_tiny_url($long_url); // Getting short URL from long URL

echo "Short URL is $new_url"; // Print the short url, in this case “Short URL is http://tinyurl.com/lvogdo”