Create shorter version of url in php

Question

I have an url like this :

http://domain.com/key1=00998833&key2=8666886&par3=testing&page=2

There are many parameters in the url, but I need to show a shorter version of url when the page is being displayed on Browser. To be more clear, I need the url to be something like: http://domain.com/link123456 or in a slightly different way.

Is there any way to do it ?

I searched a lot for but couldn't find any solution yet.

Thanks

Answer 1

Put on your htaccess file:

RewriteRule   ^link123456/?$   index.php?key1=00998833&key2=8666886&par3=testing&page=2 [L,QSA]

Answer 2

If you need all the vars, you can’t shorten them. What you can do is store the keys locally in a DB and put the ID of the row from the DB in the url.

Then when the url is loaded, you just check the DB for the row with the vars.

Answer 3

Actually the urls will be generated from shortcode. Parameter settings will vary for each url - Comment Source

This makes me believe that you're wanting a database to store short urls against long urls.

You can use index.php as your router, and store the short URLs in the database against the long URLs.

Create a .htaccess rewrite rule

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [NC,QSA]

This will make http://example.com/short123456 "redirect" to http://example.com/index.php?q=short123456.

Create your database (assuming MySQL)

CREATE TABLE `urls` (
  `short_url` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `long_url` varchar(500) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

We'll be storing our short and long urls here.

Create your router

In the .htaccess rewrite rule, we're going to index.php. So, within your index.php, we can do the following;

<?php
if( isset($_GET['q']) ) { //See if there is any query string
  $short_code = ctype_alnum( (string) $_GET['q']) ? (string) $_GET['q'] : ''; //Filter out any potential nasty characters.
  /**
   * Query database
   * SELECT `long_url` FROM `urls` WHERE `short_url` = $short_code
   * Best to use PDO or MySQLi to do this (and I'm assuming you're using a MySQL database to store these)
   */
   if($query->num_rows) { //There is a result
      $result = $query->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC); //Assuming you've used PDO
      header('Location: '. $result['long_url']); //Redirect to the long url
      die;
   } else {
      //Short code doesn't exist
      http_response_code(404); //No result, return with 404 Not Found
      die;
   } 
} else {
   //Do other logic...
}