How to develop a simple URL short generator using PHP

How to use PHP to develop a simple short URL generator
The short URL generator can convert long URLs into short, easy-to-remember URLs to facilitate users to share and spread. This article will introduce how to use PHP to develop a simple short URL generator and provide specific code examples.

Step 1: Create a database
First, we need to create a database to store the correspondence between long URLs and short URLs. It is recommended to use a relational database such as MySQL. Create a table in the database containing two fields: id and url. Among them, id is an auto-incrementing primary key, and url is a field used to store long URLs.

Step 2: Create a web page
Next, we need to create a web page for users to enter a long URL and generate a short URL. In the web page, you can use HTML forms. After the user enters the long URL, click the submit button for processing.

First, at the top of the web page, add a form that contains an input box and a submit button. The input box is used for users to enter long URLs, and the submit button is used to submit the form.

<form action="generate.php" method="post">
  <input type="text" name="url" placeholder="输入长网址">
  <input type="submit" value="生成短网址">
</form>

Step 3: Process form submission
When the user clicks the submit button, the webpage will send a POST request to the generate.php page and pass the long URL entered by the user to the page for processing. In the generate.php page, get the long URL entered by the user and then generate the short URL.

First, get the long URL entered by the user through the $_POST array.

$url = $_POST['url'];

Next, we need to generate the short URL. A simple method can be used, which is to perform MD5 hash calculation on the long URL and take the first 6 digits of the hash result as the short URL. Use the substr function to intercept the first 6 characters.

$shortUrl = substr(md5($url), 0, 6);

To store the generated short URL in the database, you can use the MySQL INSERT statement. Assume we have connected to the database and selected the correct table.

$query = "INSERT INTO urls (url, short_url) VALUES ('$url', '$shortUrl')";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

In addition, the generated short URL needs to be displayed to the user. You can add the domain name of the URL before the generated short URL so that users can click to access it.

$domain = "http://your_domain.com/";
$shortUrl = $domain . $shortUrl;
echo "短网址： " . $shortUrl;

Finally, close the connection to the database.

mysqli_close($connection);

Step 4: Access the short URL
After completing the above steps, we have been able to generate the short URL. When a user accesses using the generated short URL, the short URL needs to be redirected to the corresponding long URL.

You can use PHP's header function to implement redirection.

$shortUrl = $_GET['shorturl'];
$query = "SELECT url FROM urls WHERE short_url='$shortUrl'";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);
$row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result);
$longUrl = $row['url'];
header("Location: $longUrl");

In the above code, we first obtain the parameters passed when accessing the short URL, that is, the short URL itself. Then, the corresponding long URL is found by querying the database, and the header function is used to redirect the user to the long URL.

So far, we have completed the development of a simple short URL generator. Using the long URL generator, users can enter a long URL and generate a short URL, and they can also access the original long URL through the generated short URL.

Summary:
This article details how to use PHP to develop a simple short URL generator and provides specific code examples. The focus involves the process of database creation, web page creation, form submission processing, and access redirection of short URLs. Readers can further improve and expand the functions of the short URL generator based on the sample code provided in this article.

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