I have been quite intrigued with the working of these URL shortner scripts and surprisingly most of them employ an ingenious solution to compress the URL to a shortened one.
http://example.com/fe45 ——-> http://corpocrat.com/blah/page.htm
The answer is base36 encoding. why base36? because it can contain 26 alphabets and 10 numbers in the output. This is surprisingly simple way of encoding a URL.
Base 36 is nothing but, you keep on dividing a number by 36, collect its reminders (or modulo) and map them to the corresponding table of alphabets and numbers. see base 36 table.
This is how most URL shortner scripts work…
1. First Insert a long URL into the database. Get the id of row which should be a primary key and unique. In most cases it can also be auto increment.
URLs are stored in database with unique id.
-----------------------------------------------
ID URL
-----------------------------------------------
10099 http://corpocrat.com/
14566 http://corpocrat.com/blah/page.htm
2. Now get the corresponding ID to that URL stored in database. Since the ID it can contain only numbers 0-9 (base 10), convert to base 36 using php function base_convert from 10 to 36
<?php
$id = "10099";
echo base_convert($id,10,36);
?>
Output:
1099 ——-> uj
10099 ——> 7sj
100099 —–> 258j
As you see the output produced by base36, smaller numbers output fewer characters and for even millionth number, we generate just 4 characters in length in the form of mixed alphabets and numbers.
3. Store that base36 output in the database, respective to that of ID in a separate field. so the trimmed version of URL becomes….
http://example.com/7sj
for the URL http://corpocrat.com with ID 10099 stored in the database.
The above http://example.com/7sj is a mod-write for the php page
http://example.com/7sj -----> http://example.com/short.php?baseid=7sj
which queries the database based for destination URL against base38 stored and then redirects.
The above is a very simple technique and besides this there are many more techniques for URL shortening, for which i recommend the below referenced resources.
Enjoy!
Useful References
* URL compression for huge set of URLs in GB sizes – http://anres.cpe.ku.ac.th….ncsec.pdf
* URL shortening hashes – http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000935.html
Note: Base 64 can also give wide range of characters in url shortening.
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October 2, 2009
you can actually improve on this by using a URL safe base 64 conversion. this utilizes the uppercase Letters and
+’ and ‘/’ characters of standard Base64 are respectively replaced by ‘-’ and ‘_’. because of the extra 28 characters used. you can generate far more short URLS for the same number of digits in the ID. I actually have a very early version of this working on Google App Engine at minrlz.com.
October 15, 2009
Nice article. I am thinking about develop an url shortening page for my website and this article is very useful.
October 16, 2009
Nice article. Though you should also consider base64 method as described by Steve or checkout how wordpress generate such random passwords, same method can be used as generate url shorter.
Check this article “How to generate random password like WordPress using PHP? ” http://tinyurl.com/kuupv5.
-Abhinav
November 10, 2009
Thanks a lot!
This will help me in developing my scripts further and expand my business.
Oliver
November 20, 2009
nice post.. thanks for sharing base36 encoding for url shorting…
February 22, 2010
nice article, thanks
March 16, 2010
Thanks a lot, I just started reading about URL shortening and this was a wonderful start.
Keep up the good work.
April 23, 2010
Is there any benefit to adding backward references to URLs which contain exactly the same string?
i.e.
———————————————–
ID URL
———————————————–
10099 http://corpocrat.com/
14566 http://corpocrat.com/blah/page.htm
could become:
———————————————–
ID URL
———————————————–
10099 http://corpocrat.com/
14566 10099/blah/page.htm
A translation function would then replace all URLs not beginning with http:// with the URL of the referenced ID.
This can be further improved for speed by creating a separate field for the base URL.
Such a technique might improve storage, but I wonder there is a way it can be used to make the URLs shorter as well?
June 22, 2010
As the baseXX url is generated by converting the link ID (and not its URL), the only benefit you’ll have is, as you said, the DB storage size.
But it will mean more process needed (two DB queries instead of one), and some issues if, for example, url 10099 changes.