forgedeuphoria.com

Welcome to another PHP tutorial from ForgedEuphoria. This time around we’ll be looking at how to use PHP to input a TinyURL and display the real page’s URL, thus ‘uncloaking’ the link. Let’s get into it!

Here’s the full code for our function:

<?php
function reverseTinyURL($url){
    $url = explode('.com/', $url);
    $url = 'http://preview.tinyurl.com/'.$url[1];
    $preview = file_get_contents($url);
    preg_match('/redirecturl" href="(.*)">/', $preview, $matches);
    return $matches[1];
}
?>

Download this code: revTinyURL.phps

Let’s break it down..

The first line of code declares that it is a function, ‘reverseTinyURL’.

function reverseTinyURL($url){

Next our function splits the URL, starting with .com. Next it gets the source of TinyURL preview page, which is where we will find our uncloaked URL.


$url = explode('.com/', $url);
$url = 'http://preview.tinyurl.com/'.$url[1];
$preview = file_get_contents($url);


Finally it uses the PHP preg_match function to find the line of HTML where our link is hidden and then returns it as a URL.


preg_match('/redirecturl" href="(.*)">/', $preview, $matches);
return $matches[1];
}


If you want to know how to use the function, see below.

<? reverseTinyURL('http://tinyurl.com/2frj9u'); // returns http://www.forgedeuphoria.com/blog/ ?>

Download this code: revTinyURL-example.phps

Pretty neat, eh?

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